amartya sen

The Idea of Justice

The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

In memory of

John Rawls

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sen, Amartya, 1933–The idea of justice / Amartya Sen.

p. cm.ISBN 978-0-674-03613-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Justice. 2. Social contract. 3. Rawls, John, 1921–2002. Theory of justice.

4. Ethics. I. Title.JC578.S424 2009320.01’1 dc22

2009014924

A VERSION OF SOPHOCLES’ PHILOCTETES by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1990 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission

of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpt from THE CURE AT TROY:

Copyright © 2009 by Amartya Sen

—

ISBN 978-0-674-06047-0 (pbk.)

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2011

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Contents

Preface viiAcknowledgements xxi

Introduction An Approach to Justice 1

part i

The Demands of Justice

1 Reason and Objectivity 31

2 Rawls and Beyond 52

3 Institutions and Persons 75

4 Voice and Social Choice 87

5 Impartiality and Objectivity 114

6 Closed and Open Impartiality 124

part ii

Forms of Reasoning

7 Position, Relevance and Illusion 155

8 Rationality and Other People 174

9 Plurality of Impartial Reasons 194

10 Realizations, Consequences and Agency 208

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part iii

The Materials of Justice

11 Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities 225

12 Capabilities and Resources 253

13 Happiness, Well-being and Capabilities 269

14 Equality and Liberty 291

part iv

Public Reasoning and Democracy

15 Democracy as Public Reason 321

16 The Practice of Democracy 338

17 Human Rights and Global Imperatives 355

18 Justice and the World 388

Notes 417Name Index 451Subject Index 462

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Preface

‘In the little world in which children have their existence’, says Pipin Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, ‘there is nothing so finelyperceived and finely felt, as injustice.’1 I expect Pip is right: he vividlyrecollects after his humiliating encounter with Estella the ‘capriciousand violent coercion’ he suffered as a child at the hands of his ownsister. But the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adulthuman beings as well. What moves us, reasonably enough, is not therealization that the world falls short of being completely just – whichfew of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injusticesaround us which we want to eliminate.This is evident enough in our day-to-day life, with inequities or

subjugations from which we may suffer and which we have goodreason to resent, but it also applies to more widespread diagnoses ofinjustice in the wider world in which we live. It is fair to assume thatParisians would not have stormed the Bastille, Gandhi would not havechallenged the empire on which the sun used not to set, Martin LutherKing would not have fought white supremacy in ‘the land of the freeand the home of the brave’, without their sense of manifest injusticesthat could be overcome. They were not trying to achieve a perfectlyjust world (even if there were any agreement on what that would belike), but they did want to remove clear injustices to the extent theycould.The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates

us to think about justice and injustice, it is also central, I argue in thisbook, to the theory of justice. In the investigation presented here,diagnosis of injustice will figure often enough as the starting point for

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critical discussion.2 But, it may be asked, if this is a reasonable startingpoint, why can’t it also be a good ending point? What is the need togo beyond our sense of justice and injustice? Why must we have atheory of justice?To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our

immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reason-ing. We have to ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see, and ask whatthose perceptions indicate and how we may take them into accountwithout being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to thereliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice couldserve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand criticalexamination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of aconclusion based mainly on signals. Adam Smith’s conviction of theimportance of moral sentiments did not stop him from seeking a‘theory of moral sentiments’, nor from insisting that a sense of wrong-doing be critically examined through reasoned scrutiny to see whetherit can be the basis of a sustainable condemnation. A similar require-ment of scrutiny applies to an inclination to praise someone orsomething.*We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the

assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injus-tice. In what way can a diagnosis of injustice, or the identification ofwhat would reduce or eliminate it, be objective? Does this demandimpartiality in some particular sense, such as detachment from one’sown vested interests? Does it also demand re-examination of someattitudes even if they are not related to vested interests, but reflectlocal preconceptions and prejudices, which may not survive reasonedconfrontation with others not restricted by the same parochialism?What is the role of rationality and of reasonableness in understandingthe demands of justice?These concerns and some closely related general questions are

addressed in the first ten chapters, before I move on to issues of

* Smith’s classic book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published exactly 250years ago in 1759, and the last revised edition – the 6th – in 1790. In the newanniversary edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments2009), I discuss, in the Introduction, the nature of Smith’s moral and po litica lengagement and its continuing relevance to the contemporary world.

(New York: Penguin Books,

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application, involving critical assessment of the grounds on whichjudgements about justice are based (whether freedoms, capabilities,resources, happiness, well-being or something else), the special rel-evance of diverse considerations that figure under the general headingsof equality and liberty, the evident connection between pursuing jus-tice and seeking democracy seen as ''''‘government by discussion’, andthe nature, viability and reach of claims of human rights.

What Kind of a Theory?

What is presented here is a theory of justice in a very broad sense. Itsaim is to clarify howwe can proceed to address questions of enhancingjustice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions ofquestions about the nature of perfect justice. In this there are cleardifferences with the pre-eminent theories of justice in contemporarymoral and political philosophy. As will be discussed more fully inthe Introduction that follows, three differences in particular demandspecific attention.First, a theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical

reasoning must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice andadvance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterization ofperfectly just societies – an exercise that is such a dominant feature ofmany theories of justice in political philosophy today. The two exer-cises for identifying perfectly just arrangements, and for determiningwhether a particular social change would enhance justice, do havemotivational links but they are nevertheless analytically disjoined. Thelatter question, on which this work concentrates, is central to makingdecisions about institutions, behaviour and other determinants ofjustice, and how these decisions are derived cannot but be crucial toa theory of justice that aims at guiding practical reasoning about whatshould be done. The assumption that this comparative exercise cannotbe undertaken without identifying, first, the demands of perfect jus-tice, can be shown to be entirely incorrect (as is discussed in Chapter4, ‘Voice and Social Choice’).Second, while many comparative questions of justice can be success-

fully resolved – and agreed upon in reasoned arguments – there could

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well be other comparisons in which conflicting considerations are notfully resolved. It is argued here that there can exist several distinctreasons of justice, each of which survives critical scrutiny, but yieldsdivergent conclusions.* Reasonable arguments in competing direc-tions can emanate from people with diverse experiences and tra-ditions, but they can also come from within a given society, or forthat matter, even from the very same person.†There is a need for reasoned argument, with oneself andwith others,

in dealing with conflicting claims, rather than for what can be called‘disengaged toleration’, with the comfort of such a lazy resolution as:‘you are right in your community and I am right in mine’. Reasoningand impartial scrutiny are essential. However, even the most vigorousof critical examination can still leave conflicting and competing argu-ments that are not eliminated by impartial scrutiny. I shall have moreto say on this in what follows, but I emphasize here that the necessityof reasoning and scrutiny is not compromised in any way by thepossibility that some competing priorities may survive despite theconfrontation of reason. The plurality with which we will then endup will be the result of reasoning, not of abstention from it.Third, the presence of remediable injustice may well be connected

with behavioural transgressions rather than with institutional short-comings (Pip’s recollection, in Great Expectations, of his coercivesister was just that, not an indictment of the family as an institution).Justice is ultimately connected with the way people’s lives go, andnot merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them. Incontrast, many of the principal theories of justice concentrate over-

* The importance of valuational plurality has been extensively – and powerfully –explored by Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. Pluralities can survive even within agiven community, or even for a particular person, and they need not be reflections ofvalues of ‘different communities’. However, variations of values between people indifferent communities can also be significant (as has been discussed, in different ways,in important contributions by Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel,among others).† For example, Marx expounded the case both for eliminating the exploitation oflabour (related to the justness of getting what can be seen as the product of one’sefforts) and for allocation according to needs (related to the demands of distributivejustice). He went on to discuss the inescapable conflict between these two priorities inhis last substantial writing: The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).

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whelmingly on how to establish ‘just institutions’, and give somederivative and subsidiary role to behavioural features. For example,John Rawls’s rightly celebrated approach of ‘justice as fairness’ yieldsa unique set of ‘principles of justice’ that are exclusively concernedwith setting up ‘just institutions’ (to constitute the basic structure ofthe society), while requiring that people’s behaviour complies entirelywith the demands of proper functioning of these institutions.3 In theapproach to justice presented in this work, it is argued that thereare some crucial inadequacies in this overpowering concentration oninstitutions (where behaviour is assumed to be appropriately com-pliant), rather than on the lives that people are able to lead. The focuson actual lives in the assessment of justice has many far-reachingimplications for the nature and reach of the idea of justice.*The departure in the theory of justice that is explored in this work

has a direct bearing, I argue, on political and moral philosophy. ButI have also tried to discuss the relevance of the arguments presentedhere with some of the ongoing engagements in law, economics andpolitics, and it might, if one were ready to be optimistic, even havesome pertinence to debates and decisions on practical policies andprogrammes.†The use of a comparative perspective, going well beyond the limited

– and limiting – framework of social contract, can make a usefulcontribution here. We are engaged in making comparisons in termsof the advancement of justice whether we fight oppression (like slav-ery, or the subjugation of women), or protest against systematic medi-cal neglect (through the absence of medical facilities in parts of Africaor Asia, or a lack of universal health coverage in most countries in

* The recent investigation of what has come to be called the ‘capability perspective’fits directly into the understanding of justice in terms of human lives and the freedomsthat the persons can respectively exercise. See Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen(eds), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The reach and limits ofthat perspective will be examined in Chapters 11–14.† For example, the case for what is called here ‘open impartiality’, which admits voicesfrom far as well as near in interpreting the justice of laws (not only for the sake offairness to others, but also for the avoidance of parochialism, as discussed by AdamSmith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in Lectures on Jurisprudence), hasdirect relevance to some of the contemporary debates in the Supreme Court of theUnited States, as is discussed in the concluding chapter of this book (Chapter 18).

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the world, including the United States), or repudiate the permissibilityof torture (which continues to be used with remarkable frequency inthe contemporary world – sometimes by pillars of the global establish-ment), or reject the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (for example inIndia, despite the successful abolition of famines).* We may oftenenough agree that some changes contemplated (like the abolition ofapartheid, to give an example of a different kind) will reduce injustice,but even if all such agreed changes are successfully implemented,we will not have anything that we can call perfect justice. Practicalconcerns, no less than theoretical reasoning, seem to demand a fairlyradical departure in the analysis of justice.

Public Reasoning andDemocracy and Global Justice

Even though in the approach presented here principles of justice willnot be defined in terms of institutions, but rather in terms of the livesand freedoms of the people involved, institutions cannot but play asignificant instrumental role in the pursuit of justice. Together withthe determinants of individual and social behaviour, an appropriatechoice of institutions has a critically important place in the enterpriseof enhancing justice. Institutions come into the reckoning in manydifferent ways. They can contribute directly to the lives that peopleare able to lead in accordance with what they have reason to value.Institutions can also be important in facilitating our ability to scrutin-ize the values and priorities that we can consider, especially throughopportunities for public discussion (this will include considerations offreedom of speech and right to information as well as actual facilitiesfor informed discussion).In this work, democracy is assessed in terms of public reasoning

* I was privileged to address the Indian Parliament on ‘The Demands of Justice’ on11 August 2008 at the invitation of the Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee. This was the first Hiren Mukerjee Memorial Lecture, which is going to be an annual parliamentary event. The full version of the address is available in a brochure printed by the Indian Parliament, and a shortened version is published in The Little Magazine, vol. 8, issues 1 and 2 (2009), under the title ‘What Should Keep Us Awake at Night’.

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(Chapters 15–17), which leads to an understanding of democracy as‘government by discussion’ (an idea that John Stuart Mill did muchto advance). But democracy must also be seen more generally in termsof the capacity to enrich reasoned engagement through enhancinginformational availability and the feasibility of interactive discussions.Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formallyexist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sectionsof the people can actually be heard.Furthermore, this way of seeing democracy can have an impact on

the pursuit of it at the global level – not just within a nation-state. Ifdemocracy is not seen simply in terms of the setting up of some specificinstitutions (like a democratic global government or global elections),but in terms of the possibility and reach of public reasoning, the taskof advancing – rather than perfecting – both global democracy andglobal justice can be seen as eminently understandable ideas that canplausibly inspire and influence practical actions across borders.

The European Enlightenmentand Our Global Heritage

What can I say about the antecedents of the approach I am trying topresent here? I will discuss this question more fully in the Introductionthat follows, but I should point out that the analysis of justice I presentin this book draws on lines of reasoning that received particularexploration in the period of intellectual discontent during the Euro-pean Enlightenment. Having said that, however, I must immediatelymake a couple of clarificatory points to prevent possible misunder-standing.The first clarification is to explain that the connection of this work

with the tradition of European Enlightenment does not make theintellectual background of this book particularly ‘European’. Indeed,one of the unusual – some will probably say eccentric – features ofthis book compared with other writings on the theory of justice is theextensive use that I have made of ideas from non-Western societies,particularly from Indian intellectual history, but also from elsewhere.There are powerful traditions of reasoned argument, rather than

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reliance on faith and unreasoned convictions, in India’s intellectualpast, as there are in the thoughts flourishing in a number of othernon-Western societies. In confining attention almost exclusively toWestern literature, the contemporary – and largely Western – pur-suit of political philosophy in general and of the demands of justicein particular has been, I would argue, limited and to some extentparochial.*It is not, however, my claim that there is some radical dissonance

between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ (or generally, non-Western) thinkingon these subjects. There are many differences in reasoning within theWest, and within the East, but it would be altogether fanciful to thinkof a united West confronting ‘quintessentially eastern’ priorities.†Such views, which are not unknown in contemporary discussions, arequite distant from my understanding. It is my claim, rather, thatsimilar – or closely linked – ideas of justice, fairness, responsibility,duty, goodness and rightness have been pursued in many differentparts of the world, which can expand the reach of arguments thathave been considered inWestern literature and that the global presenceof such reasoning is often overlooked or marginalized in the dominanttraditions of contemporary Western discourse.Some of the reasoning of, for example, Gautama Buddha (the agnos-

tic champion of the ‘path of knowledge’), or of the writers in the

* Kautilya, the ancient Indian writer on political strategy and political economy, hassometimes been described in the modern literature, when he has been noticed at all,as ‘the Indian Machiavelli’. This is unsurprising in some respects, since there are somesimilarities in their ideas on strategies and tactics (despite profound differences inmany other – often more important – areas), but it is amusing that an Indian politicalanalyst from the fourth century bc has to be introduced as a local version of anEuropean writer born in the fifteenth century. What this reflects is not, of course, anykind of crude assertion of a geographical pecking order, but simply the lack offamiliarity with non-Western literature of Western intellectuals (and in fact intellec-tuals all across the modern world because of the global dominance of Western edu-cation today).† Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that there are no quintessentially eastern priorities,not even quintessentially Indian ones, since arguments in many different directionscan be seen in the intellectual history of these countries (see my The ArgumentativeIndian (London and Delhi: Penguin, and New York: FSG, 2005), and Identity andViolence: The Illusion ofDestiny (NewYork: Norton, and London andDelhi: Penguin,2006).

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Lokayata school (committed to relentless scrutiny of every traditionalbelief) in India in sixth-century bc, may sound closely aligned, ratherthan adversarial, to many of the critical writings of the leading authorsof the European Enlightenment. But we do not have to get all steamedup in trying to decide whether Gautama Buddha should be seen as ananticipating member of some European Enlightenment league (hisacquired name does, after all, mean ‘enlightened’ in Sanskrit); nor dowe have to consider the far-fetched thesis that the European Enlighten-ment may be traceable to long-distance influence of Asian thought.There is nothing particularly odd in the recognition that similar intel-lectual engagements have taken place in different parts of the globein distinct stages of history. Since somewhat different arguments haveoften been advanced in dealing with similar questions, we may missout on possible leads in reasoning about justice if we keep ourexplorations regionally confined.One example of some interest and relevance is an important distinc-

tion between two different concepts of justice in early Indian jurispru-dence – between niti and nyaya. The former idea, that of niti, relatesto organizational propriety as well as behavioural correctness,whereas the latter, nyaya, is concerned with what emerges and how,and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead. Thedistinction, the relevance of which will be discussed in the Introduc-tion, helps us to see clearly that there are two rather different, thoughnot unrelated, kinds of justness for which the idea of justice has tocater.*My second explanatory remark relates to the fact that the Enlighten-

ment authors did not speak in one voice. As I will discuss in theIntroduction, there is a substantial dichotomy between two differentlines of reasoning about justice that can be seen among two groupsof leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the

* The distinction between nyaya and niti has significance not only within a polity, butalso across the borders of states, as is discussed in my essay ‘Global Justice’, presentedat the World Justice Forum in Vienna, July 2008, sponsored by the American BarAssociation, along with the International Bar Association, Inter-American Bar Associ-ation, Inter-Pacific Bar Association, and Union Internationale des Avocats. This is partof the American Bar Association’s ‘World Justice Program’, and published inGlobal Perspectives on the Rule of Law, eds. James Heckman, Robert Nelson andLee Cabatingan (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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Enlightenment period. One approach concentrated on identifyingperfectly just social arrangements, and took the characterization of‘just institutions’ to be the principal – and often the only identified –task of the theory of justice. Woven in different ways around the ideaof a hypothetical ‘social contract’, major contributions were made inthis line of thinking by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century,and later by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant,among others. The contractarian approach has been the dominantinfluence in contemporary political philosophy, particularly since apioneering paper (’Justice as Fairness’) in 1958 by John Rawls whichpreceded his definitive statement on that approach in his classic book,A Theory of Justice.4

In contrast, a number of other Enlightenment philosophers (Smith,Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Marx, John Stuart Mill, forexample) took a variety of approaches that shared a common interestin making comparisons between different ways in which people’s livesmay be led, influenced by institutions but also by people’s actualbehaviour, social interactions and other significant determinants. Thisbook draws to a great extent on that alternative tradition.* Theanalytical – and rather mathematical – discipline of ‘social choicetheory’, which can be traced to the works of Condorcet in theeighteenth century, but which has been developed in the present formby the pioneering contributions of Kenneth Arrow in the mid-twentieth century, belongs to this second line of investigation. Thatapproach, suitably adapted, can make a substantial contribution, as Iwill discuss, to addressing questions about the enhancement of justiceand the removal of injustice in the world.

* This will not, however, prevent me from drawing on insights from the first approach,from the enlightenment we get from the writings, for example, of Hobbes and Kant,and in our time, from John Rawls.

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The Place of Reason

Despite the differences between the two traditions of the Enlighten-ment – the contractarian and the comparative – there are many pointsof similarity as well. The common features include reliance on reason-ing and the invoking of the demands of public discussion. Even thoughthis book relates mainly to the second approach, rather than to con-tractarian reasoning developed by Immanuel Kant and others, muchof the book is driven by the basic Kantian insight (as ChristineKorsgaard puts it): ‘Bringing reason to the world becomes the enter-prise of morality rather than metaphysics, and the work as well as thehope of humanity.’5

To what extent reasoning can provide a reliable basis for a theoryof justice is, of course, itself an issue that has been subject to contro-versy. The first chapter of the book is concerned with the role andreach of reasoning. I argue against the plausibility of seeing emotionsor psychology or instincts as independent sources of valuation, with-out reasoned appraisal. Impulses and mental attitudes remain impor-tant, however, since we have good reasons to take note of them inour assessment of justice and injustice in the world. There is noirreducible conflict here, I argue, between reason and emotion, andthere are very good reasons for making room for the relevance ofemotions.There is, however, a different kind of critique of the reliance on

reasoning that points to the prevalence of unreason in the world andto the unrealism involved in assuming that the world will go in theway reason dictates. In a kind but firm critique of my work in relatedfields, Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, ‘however much youextend your understanding of reason in the sorts of ways Sen wouldlike to do – and this is a project whose interest I celebrate – it isn’tgoing to take you the whole way. In adopting the perspective ofthe individual reasonable person, Sen has to turn his face from thepervasiveness of unreason.’6 As a description of the world, Appiah isclearly right, and his critique, which is not addressed to building atheory of justice, presents good grounds for scepticism about thepractical effectiveness of reasoned discussion of confused social

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subjects (such as the politics of identity). The prevalence and resilienceof unreason may make reason-based answers to difficult questions farless effective.This particular scepticism of the reach of reasoning does not yield

– nor (as Appiah makes clear) is it intended to yield – any ground fornot using reason to the extent one can, in pursuing the idea of justiceor any other notion of social relevance, such as identity.* Nor does itundermine the case for our trying to persuade each other to scrutinizeour respective conclusions. It is also important to note that what mayappear to others as clear examples of ‘unreason’ may not alwaysbe exactly that.† Reasoned discussion can accommodate conflictingpositions that may appear to others to be ‘unreasoned’ prejudice,without this being quite the case. There is no compulsion, as is some-times assumed, to eliminate every reasoned alternative except exactlyone.However, the central point in dealing with this question is that

prejudices typically ride on the back of some kind of reasoning – weakand arbitrary though it might be. Indeed, even very dogmatic personstend to have some kinds of reasons, possibly very crude ones, insupport of their dogmas (racist, sexist, classist and caste-based preju-dices belong there, among varieties of other kinds of bigotry based oncoarse reasoning). Unreason is mostly not the practice of doing with-out reasoning altogether, but of relying on very primitive and verydefective reasoning. There is hope in this, since bad reasoning can beconfronted by better reasoning. So the scope for reasoned engagementdoes exist, even though many people may refuse, at least initially, toenter that engagement, despite being challenged.What is important for the arguments in this book is not anything

* There is, in fact, considerable evidence that interactive public discussions can helpto weaken the refusal to reason. See the empirical material on this presented inDevelopment as Freedom (New York: Knopf, and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999),and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, and London:Penguin, 2006).† As James Thurber notes, while those who are superstitious may avoid walking underladders, the scientific minds who ‘want to defy the superstition’ may choose to ‘lookfor ladders and delight in passing under them’. But ‘if you keep looking for andwalking under the ladders long enough, something is going to happen to you’ (JamesThurber, ‘Let Your Mind Alone!’ New Yorker, 1May 1937).

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like the omnipresence of reason in everyone’s thinking right now. Nosuch presumption can be made, and it is not needed. The claim thatpeople would agree on a particular proposition if they were to reasonin an open and impartial way does not, of course, assume that peopleare already so engaged, or even that they are eager to be so. Whatmatters most is the examination of what reasoning would demand forthe pursuit of justice – allowing for the possibility that there mayexist several different reasonable positions. That exercise is quitecompatible with the possibility, even the certainty, that at a particulartime not everyone is willing to undertake such scrutiny. Reasoning iscentral to the understanding of justice even in a world which containsmuch ‘unreason’; indeed, it may be particularly important in such aworld.

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Acknowledgements

In acknowledging the help I have received from others in the workpresented here, I must begin by recording that my greatest debt is toJohn Rawls, who inspired me to work in this area. He was also amarvellous teacher over many decades and his ideas continue to influ-ence me even when I disagree with some of his conclusions. This bookis dedicated to his memory, not only for the education and affectionI received from him, but also for his encouragement to pursue mydoubts.My first extensive contact with Rawls was in 1968–9, when I came

from Delhi University to Harvard as a visiting professor and taught ajoint graduate seminar with him and Kenneth Arrow. Arrow has beenanother powerful influence on this book, as on many of my pastworks. His influence has come not only through extensive discussionsover many decades, but also through the use I make of the analyticalframework of modern social choice theory that he initiated.The work presented here was done at Harvard where I have been

mostly based since 1987, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, particu-larly during the six years between 1998 and 2004 when I went backthere to serve as the Master of the great college where, fifty years ago,I had started thinking about philosophical issues. I was influenced inparticular by Piero Sraffa and C. D. Broad, and encouraged byMaurice Dobb and Dennis Robertson to pursue my inclinations.This book has been slow in coming, since my doubts and con-

structive thoughts have developed over a long period of time. Duringthese decades, I have been privileged to receive comments, suggestions,questions, dismissals and encouragement from a large number of

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people, all of which have been very useful for me and my acknowledge­ment list is not going to be short. I must first note the help and advice I have received from my wife, Emma rothschild, whose in flu ence is re flected throughout the book. The in flu ence of Bernard Williams on my thinking on philosophical issues will be apparent to readers familiar with his writings. This in flu ence came over many years of ‘chatty friendship’ and also from a productive period of joint work in planning, editing and introducing a collection of essays on the utilitarian perspective and its limitations (Utilitarianism and Beyond, 1982). I have been very fortunate in having colleagues with whom I have had instructive conversations on po lit i cal and moral philosophy. I must acknowledge my extensive debt—in addition to rawls—to Hilary Putnam and Thomas Scanlon for many illuminating conver­sations over the years. I also learned a great deal from talking with W. V. O. Quine and robert Nozick, both of whom are now, alas, gone. Holding joint classes at Harvard has also been for me a steady source of dialectical education, both from my students and my co­teachers. robert Nozick and I taught joint courses ev ery year for nearly a de cade, on a number of occasions with Eric Maskin, and they have both in flu enced my thinking. At various times I have also taught courses with Joshua Cohen (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Christine Jolls, Philippe Van Parijs, Michael Sandel, John rawls, Thomas Scanlon and richard Tuck, and with Kaushik Basu and James Foster when they visited Harvard. Aside from my sheer enjoyment of these joint classes, they were also tremendously useful for me in developing my ideas, often in arguments with my co­teachers. In all my writings I bene fit a lot from the critiques of my students. regarding the ideas in this book, I would like to acknowledge my interactions especially with Prasanta Pattanaik, Kaushik Basu, Sid­diqur Osmani, rajat Deb, Ben Fine, ravi Kanbur, David Kelsey and Andreas Papandreou, over many de cades, and later with Stephan Klasen, Anthony Laden, Sanjay reddy, Jonathan Cohen, Felicia Knaul, Clemens Puppe, Bertil Tungodden, A. K. Shiva Kumar, Law­rence Hamilton, Douglas Hicks, Jennifer Prah ruger, Sousan Aba­dian, among others. I would also like to record the impact of discus­sions on related subjects with other students, including Luigi Spaventa

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(my first research student), Sourin Bhattacharya, D. P. Chaudhuri, Kanchan Chopra, Luca d’Agliano, John Wriglesworth, Yasumi Mat­sumoto, Jonathan riley, Martin Sandbu, Madoka Saito, rama Mani, Eoghan Stafford and Nirvikar Singh. The joys and bene fits of interactive teaching go back for me to the 1970s and 1980s when I taught joint classes—‘riotous’ ones, a stu­dent told me—at Oxford with ronald Dworkin and Derek Parfit, later joined by G. A. Cohen. My warm memories of those argumen­tative discussions were recently revived by the kindness of Cohen who arranged a hugely engaging seminar at University College Lon­don in January 2009 on the main approach of this book. The gather­ing was agreeably full of dissenters, including Cohen (of course), but also Jonathan Wolff, Laura Valentis, riz Mokal, George Letsas and Stephen Guest, whose different critiques have been very helpful for me (Laura Valentis kindly sent me further comments in communica­tions after the seminar). Even though a theory of justice must belong primarily to philoso­phy, the book uses ideas presented in a number of other disciplines as well. A major field of work on which this book draws heavily is social choice theory. Although my interactions with others working in this broad area are too numerous to capture in a short statement here, I would like particularly to acknowledge the bene fit I have received from working with Kenneth Arrow and Kotaro Suzumura, with whom I have been editing the Handbook of Social Choice Theory (the first volume is out, the second overdue), and also to note my ap­preciation of the leadership role that has been played in this field by Jerry Kelly, Wulf Gaertner, Prasanta Pattanaik and Maurice Salles, particularly through their visionary and tireless work for the emer­gence and flour ishing of the journal Social Choice and Welfare. I would also like to acknowledge the bene fits I have had from my long association and extended discussions on social choice prob lems in one form or another with (in addition to the names already men­tioned) Patrick Suppes, John Harsanyi, James Mirrlees, Anthony At­kinson, Peter Hammond, Charles Blackorby, Sudhir Anand, Tapas Majumdar, robert Pollak, Kevin roberts, John roemer, Anthony Shorrocks, robert Sugden, John Weymark and James Foster. A long­standing in flu ence on my work on justice, particularly re­lated to freedom and capability, has come from Martha Nussbaum.

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Her work, combined with her strong commitment to the develop­ment of the ‘capability perspective’, has deeply in flu enced many of its recent advances, including the exploration of its linkage with the classical Aristotelian ideas on ‘capacity’ and ‘flour ishing’, and also with works on human development, gender studies and human rights. The relevance and use of the capability perspective has been pow­erfully explored in recent years by the research of a group of remark­able scholars. Even though their writings have greatly in flu enced my thinking, a full list would be far too long to include here. I must, however, mention the in flu ence coming from the works of Sabina Alkire, Bina Agarwal, Tania Burchardt, Enrica Chiappero­Martinetti, Flavio Comim, David Crocker, Séverine Deneulin, Sakiko Fukuda­Parr, reiko Gotoh, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Ingrid robeyns and Polly Vizard. There is also a close connection between the capability per­spective and the new area of human development, which was pio­neered by my late friend Mahbub ul Haq, and also bears the impact of the in flu ence of Paul Streeten, Frances Stewart, Keith Griffin, Gustav ranis, richard Jolly, Meghnad Desai, Sudhir Anand, Sakiko Fukuda­Parr, Selim Jahan, among others. The Journal of Human De-velopment and Capabilities has a strong involvement with work on the capability perspective, but the journal Feminist Economics has also taken a special interest in this area, and it has always been stim­ulating for me to have conversations with its editor, Diana Strassman, on the relation between the feminist perspective and the capability approach. At Trinity I have had the excellent company of philosophers, legal thinkers and others interested in prob lems of justice, and had the op­portunity of interacting with Garry runciman, Nick Denyer, Gisela Striker, Simon Blackburn, Catherine Barnard, Joanna Miles, Ananya Kabir, Eric Nelson, and occasionally with Ian Hacking (who some­times came back to his old college where we had first met and talked as fellow students in the 1950s). I have also had the marvellous pos­sibility of conversing with outstanding mathematicians, natural sci­entists, historians, social scientists, legal theorists and scholars in humanities. I have bene fited substantially also from my conversations with other philosophers, including (in addition to those already men­

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tioned) Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, the late Isaiah Berlin, Akeel Bilgrami, Hilary Bok, Sissela Bok, Susan Brison, John Broome, Ian Carter, Nancy Cartwright, Deen Chatterjee, Drucilla Cornell, Norman Daniels, the late Donald Davidson, John Davis, Jon Elster, Barbara Fried, Allan Gibbard, Jonathan Glover, James Griffin, Amy Gutmann, Moshe Halbertal, the late richard Hare, Daniel Hausman, Ted Honderich, the late Susan Hurley, Susan James, Frances Kamm, the late Stig Kanger, Erin Kelly, Isaac Levi, Christian List, Sebastiano Maffetone, Avishai Margalit, Alistair McLeod, David Miller, the late Sidney Morgenbesser, Thomas Nagel, Carol Nicholson, Sari Nusseibeh, the late Susan Moller Okin, Charles Parsons, Herlinde Pauer­Struder, Fa­bienne Peter, Philip Pettit, Thomas Pogge, Henry richardson, Alan ryan, Carol rovane, Debra Satz, John Searle, the late Judith Shklar, Quentin Skinner, Hillel Steiner, Dennis Thompson, Charles Taylor and Judith Thomson. In legal thinking I have much bene fited from discussions with (in addition to those already cited) Bruce Ackerman, Justice Stephen Breyer, Owen Fiss, the late Herbert Hart, Tony Honoré, Anthony Lewis, Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, robert Nelson, Justice Kate O’regan, Joseph raz, Susan rose­Ackerman, Justice Stephen Sedley, Cass Sunstein and Jeremy Waldron. Even though my work for this book effectively began with my John Dewey Lectures (on ‘Well­being, Agency and Freedom’) to the Philosophy Department of Co­lumbia University in 1984, and came largely to an end with another set of philosophy lectures at Stanford University (on ‘Justice’) in 2008, I also tried out my arguments about theories of justice at vari­ous law schools. In addition to several lectures and seminars at the Law Schools of Harvard, Yale and Washington University, I also gave the Storrs Lectures (on ‘Objectivity’) at the Yale Law School in Sep­tember 1990, the rosenthal Lectures (on ‘The Domain of Justice’) at the Northwestern University Law School in September 1998, and a special lecture (on ‘Human rights and the Limits of Law’) in the Cardozo Law School in September 2005.*

* The Dewey lectures were arranged primarily by Isaac Levi, the Storrs Lectures by Guido Calabresi, the rosenthal Lectures by ronald Allen, and the Cardozo School lecture by David rudenstine. I bene fited greatly from discussions with them and their colleagues.

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In economics, which is my original field of concentration, and which has considerable relevance to the idea of justice, I have bene­fited greatly from regular discussions over many de cades with (in addition to the names already mentioned) George Akerlof, Paul Anand, Amiya Bagchi, the late Dipak Banerjee, Nirmala Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Alok Bhargava, Christopher Bliss, Samuel Bowles, Samuel Brittan, robert Cassen, the late Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Partha Dasgupta, Mrinal Datta­Chaudhuri, Angus Deaton, Meghnad Desai, Jean Drèze, Bhaskar Dutta, Jean­Paul Fitoussi, Nancy Folbre, Albert Hirschman, Devaki Jain, Jocelyn Kynch, Tapas Majumdar, Mukul Majumdar, Stephen Marglin, Dipak Mazumdar, Mamta Murthi, Luigi Pasinetti, the late I. G. Patel, the late Surendra Patel, Edmund Phelps, K. N. raj, V. K. ramachandran, Jeffrey Sachs, Ar­jun Sengupta, rehman Sobhan, Barbara Solow, robert Solow, Nich­olas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Stefano Zamagni. I have also had very useful conversations with Isher Ahluwalia, Montek Ahluwalia, the late Peter Bauer, Abhijit Banerjee, Lourdes Beneria, Timothy Besley, Ken Binmore, Nancy Birdsall, Walter Bossert, Fran ois Bourguignon, Satya Chakravarty, Kanchan Chopra, Vincent Crawford, Asim Dasgupta, Claude d’Aspremont, Peter Dia­mond, Avinash Dixit, David Donaldson, Esther Duflo, Franklin Fisher, Marc Fleurbaey, robert Frank, Benjamin Friedman, Pierangelo Garegnani, the late Louis Gevers, the late W. M. Gorman, Jan Graaff, Jean­Michel Grandmont, Jerry Green, Ted Groves, Frank Hahn, Wa­hidul Haque, Christopher Harris, Barbara Harris White, the late John Harsanyi, James Heckman, Judith Heyer, the late John Hicks, Jane Humphries, Nurul Islam, rizwanul Islam, Dale Jorgenson, Dan­iel Kahneman, Azizur rahman Khan, Qaiser Khan, Alan Kirman, Serge Kolm, Janos Kornai, Michael Kramer, the late Jean­Jacques Laffont, richard Layard, Michel Le Breton, Ian Little, Anuradha Lu­ther, the late James Meade, John Muellbauer, Philippe Mongin, Dilip Mookerjee, Anjan Mukherji, Khaleq Naqvi, Deepak Nayyar, rohini Nayyar, Mahesh Patel, Thomas Piketty, robert Pollak, Anisur rah­man, Debraj ray, Martin ravallion, Alvin roth, Christian Seidl, Luigi Spaventa, Michael Spence, T. N. Srinivasan, David Starrett, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Madhura Swaminathan, Judith Tendler, Jean Tirole, Alain Trannoy, John Vickers, the late William Vickrey, Jorgen Weibull, Glen Weyl and Menahem Yaari.

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I have also bene fited a great deal from conversations over the years on a va ri ety of other subjects closely related to justice with Krishna Ahooja­Patel, Jasodhara Bagchi, Alaka Basu, Dilip Basu, Seyla Ben­habib, Sugata Bose, Myra Buvinic, Lincoln Chen, Martha Chen, Da­vid Crocker, Barun De, John Dunn, Julio Frenk, Sakiko Fukuda­Parr, ramachandra Guha, Geeta rao Gupta, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Eric Hobsbawm, Jennifer Hochschild, Stanley Hoffmann, Alisha Hol­land, richard Horton, Ayesha Jalal, Felicia Knaul, Melissa Lane, Mary Kaldor, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Marmot, Barry Mazur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Uday Mehta, the late ralph Miliband, Chris­topher Murray, Elinor Ostrom, Carol richards, David richards, Jonathan riley, Mary robinson, Elaine Scarry, Gareth Stedman Jones, Irene Tinker, Megan Vaughan, Dorothy Wedderburn, Leon Wieseltier and James Wolfensohn. The part of the book that deals with democracy in its relation to justice (Chapters 15–17) draws on my three lectures on ‘Democracy’ at the School of Advanced Interna­tional Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University at their campus in Washington DC in 2005. Those lectures were the result of an ini­tiative of Sunil Khilnani, endorsed by Francis Fukuyama, from both of whom I received very useful suggestions. The lectures themselves yielded other discussions in these SAIS meetings that were also very useful for me. The new Harvard ‘Program on Justice, Welfare and Economics’, which I directed for five years from January 2004 to December 2008, also gave me a wonderful opportunity to interact with students and colleagues interested in similar prob lems from different fields. The new Director, Walter Johnson, is continuing—and enlarging—these interactions with great leadership, and I took the liberty of presenting the main thrust of this book in my farewell presentation to the group, receiving many excellent questions and comments. Erin Kelly and Thomas Scanlon have been immensely helpful in reading through much of the manuscript and have made a number of critically im por tant suggestions. I am most grateful to them both. I have also been extremely fortunate in doing collaborative work with Sudhir Anand over several de cades and having regular discussions with him on a va ri ety of subjects related to the theme of this book, which have enhanced my un der stand ing of the demands of justice. The expenses of research, including assistance, have been partly

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met by a five-year proj ect on democracy at the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, jointly supported by the Ford Foundation, the Rocke fel ler Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, during 2003 to 2008, and subsequently from a new proj ect supported by the Ford Foundation on ‘India in the Global World’ with a particular focus on the relevance of Indian intellectual his tory to contemporary issues. I am very grateful for this support, and also appreciative of the wonderful work of coordination of these proj ects by Inga Huld Markan. I have also had the good fortune of having extremely able and imaginative research assistants, who have taken a deep interest in the book and made a number of very produc-tive comments that have helped me to improve my arguments and presentation. For this I am much beholden to Pedro Ramos Pintos, who worked with me for over a year and left his lasting in flu ence on this book, and currently to Kirsty Walker and Afsan Bhadelia for their outstanding help and intellectual input. The book is being published both by Penguin, and for North Amer-ica by Harvard University Press. My Harvard editor, Michael Aron-son, has made a number of excellent general suggestions. The two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript gave me remarkably helpful comments, and since my detective work has revealed that they were Frank Lovett and Bill Talbott, I can even thank them by name. The production and copy-editing at Penguin Books have been carried through excellently, under huge pressure of time, by the swift and tireless work of Richard Duguid (the managing editor), Jane Robert-son (the copy-editor) and Phillip Birch (assistant editor). To them all I am most grateful. It is impossible for me to express adequately my gratitude to the editor of this work, Stuart Proffitt of Penguin Books, who has made invaluable comments and suggestions on ev ery chapter (indeed, al-most on ev ery page of ev ery chapter) and has led me to rewrite many sections of the manuscript to make it clearer and more accessible. His advice on the general or ga ni za tion of the book has also been indis-pensable. I can well imagine the relief that he will experience when this book, at long last, leaves his hands.

Amartya Sen

1

IntroductionAn Approach to Justice

About two and a half months before the storming of the Bastille inParis, which was effectively the beginning of the French Revolution,the political philosopher and orator, Edmund Burke, said in Parlia-ment in London: ‘An event has happened, upon which it is difficultto speak, and impossible to be silent.’ This was on 5 May 1789.Burke’s speech had nothing much to do with the developing stormin France. The occasion, rather, was the impeachment of WarrenHastings, who was then commanding the British East India Com-pany, which was setting up British rule in India, beginning with theCompany’s victory in the Battle of Plassey (on 23 June 1757).

In impeaching Warren Hastings, Burke invoked the ‘eternal laws ofjustice’ which, Burke claimed, Hastings had ‘violated’. The impossibil-ity of remaining silent on a subject is an observation that can be madeabout many cases of patent injustice that move us to rage in a waythat is hard for our language to capture. And yet any analysis ofinjustice would also demand clear articulation and reasoned scrutiny.

Burke did not, in fact, give much evidence of being lost for words:he spoke eloquently not on one misdeed of Hastings but on a greatmany, and proceeded from there to present simultaneously a numberof separate and quite distinct reasons for the need to indict WarrenHastings and the nature of the emerging British rule in India:

I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanours.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament

assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose

national character he has dishonoured.

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I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights,

and liberties he has subverted; whose properties he has destroyed, whose

country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which

he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly

outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situ-

ation, and condition of life.1

No argument is separated out here as the reason for impeachingWarren Hastings – as an isolated knock-out punch. Instead, Burkepresents a collection of distinct reasons for impeaching him.* Lateron in this work, I will examine the procedure of what can be called‘plural grounding’, that is, of using a number of different lines ofcondemnation, without seeking an agreement on their relative merits.The underlying issue is whether we have to agree on one specific lineof censure for a reasoned consensus on the diagnosis of an injusticethat calls for urgent rectification. What is important to note here, ascentral to the idea of justice, is that we can have a strong sense ofinjustice on many different grounds, and yet not agree on one particu-lar ground as being the dominant reason for the diagnosis of injustice.

Perhaps a more immediate, and more contemporary, illustrationof this general point about congruent implications can be given byconsidering a recent event, involving the decision of the US govern-ment to launch a military invasion of Iraq in 2003. There are diverseways of judging decisions of this kind, but the point to be consideredhere is that it is possible that a number of distinct and divergent

* I am not commenting here on the factual veracity of Burke’s claims, but only on hisgeneral approach of presenting plural grounds for indictment. Burke’s particularthesis about Hastings’s personal perfidy was actually rather unfair to Hastings. Oddlyenough, Burke had earlier defended the wily Robert Clive, who was a great deal moreresponsible for lawless plunder of India under the Company’s dominance – somethingthat Hastings did try to stem through a greater emphasis on law and order (as well asthrough bringing in a measure of humanity in the Company’s administration whichwas badly missing earlier). I have discussed these historical events in a CommemorativeSpeech at the London City Hall, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Battleof Plassey (‘The Significance of Plassey’), in June 2007. The lecture was published, inan extended version, as ‘Imperial Illusions: India, Britain and the wrong lessons’, TheNew Republic, December 2007.

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arguments can still lead to the same conclusion – in this case, that thepolicy chosen by the US-led coalition in starting the war in Iraq in2003 was mistaken.

Consider the different arguments that have been presented, eachwith considerable plausibility, as critiques of the decision to go to warin Iraq.* First, the conclusion that the invasion was a mistake can bebased on the necessity for more global agreement, particularly throughthe United Nations, before one country could justifiably land its armyon another country. A second argument can focus on the importanceof being well informed, for example on the facts regarding the presenceor absence of weapons of mass destruction in pre-invasion Iraq, beforetaking such military decisions, which would inevitably place a greatmany people in danger of being slaughtered or mutilated or displaced.A third argument may be concerned with democracy as ‘governmentby discussion’ (to use that old phrase often linked with John StuartMill, but which was used earlier by Walter Bagehot), and concentrateinstead on the political significance of informational distortion inwhat is presented to the people of the country, including cultivatedfiction (such as the imaginary links of Saddam Hussein with the eventson 9/11 or with al-Qaeda), making it harder for the citizens of Americato assess the executive proposal to go to war. A fourth argument couldsee the principal issue to be none of the above, but instead the actualconsequences of the intervention: would it bring peace and order inthe country invaded, or in the Middle East, or in the world, and couldit have been expected to reduce the dangers of global violence andterrorism, rather than intensifying them?

These are all serious considerations and they involve very differentevaluative concerns, none of which could be readily ruled out as beingirrelevant or unimportant for an appraisal of actions of this kind. Andin general, they may not yield the same conclusion. But if it is shown,as in this specific example, that all of the sustainable criteria lead tothe same diagnosis of a huge mistake, then that specific conclusion

* Arguments were of course also presented in favour of intervention. One was thebelief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorism on 9/11, and anotherthat he was hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda. Neither accusation proved to be correct. Itis true that Hussein was a brutal dictator, but then there were – and are – many othersacross the world with the same qualification.

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need not await the determination of the relative priorities to beattached to these criteria. Arbitrary reduction of multiple and potenti-ally conflicting principles to one solitary survivor, guillotining all theother evaluative criteria, is not, in fact, a prerequisite for getting usefuland robust conclusions on what should be done. This applies as muchto the theory of justice as it does to any other part of the discipline ofpractical reason.

reasoning and justice

The need for a theory of justice relates to the discipline of engagementin reasoning about a subject on which it is, as Burke noted, verydifficult to speak. It is sometimes claimed that justice is not a matterof reasoning at all; it is one of being appropriately sensitive and havingthe right nose for injustice. It is easy to be tempted to think alongthese lines. When we find, for example, a raging famine, it seemsnatural to protest rather than reason elaborately about justice andinjustice. And yet a calamity would be a case of injustice only if itcould have been prevented, and particularly if those who could haveundertaken preventive action had failed to try. Reasoning in someform cannot but be involved in moving from the observation of atragedy to the diagnosis of injustice. Furthermore, cases of injusticemay be much more complex and subtle than the assessment of anobservable calamity. There could be different arguments suggestingdisparate conclusions, and evaluations of justice may be anything butstraightforward.

The avoidance of reasoned justification often comes not from indig-nant protesters but from placid guardians of order and justice. Reti-cence has appealed throughout history to those with a governing role,endowed with public authority, who are unsure of the grounds foraction, or unwilling to scrutinize the basis of their policies. LordMansfield, the powerful English judge in the eighteenth century,famously advised a newly appointed colonial governor: ‘consider whatyou think justice requires and decide accordingly. But never give yourreasons; for your judgement will probably be right, but your reasonswill certainly be wrong.’2 This may well be a good advice for tactful

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governance, but it is surely no way of guaranteeing that the rightthings are done. Nor does it help to ensure that the people affectedcan see that justice is being done (which is, as will be discussedlater, part of the discipline of making sustainable decisions regardingjustice).

The requirements of a theory of justice include bringing reason intoplay in the diagnosis of justice and injustice. Over hundreds of years,writers on justice in different parts of the world have attempted toprovide the intellectual basis for moving from a general sense ofinjustice to particular reasoned diagnoses of injustice, and from thereto the analyses of ways of advancing justice. Traditions of reasoningabout justice and injustice have long – and striking – histories acrossthe world, from which illuminating suggestions on reasons of justicecan be considered (as will be examined presently).

the enlightenment anda basic divergence

Even though the subject of social justice has been discussed over theages, the discipline received an especially strong boost during theEuropean Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,encouraged by the political climate of change and also by the socialand economic transformation taking place then in Europe andAmerica. There are two basic, and divergent, lines of reasoning aboutjustice among leading philosophers associated with the radicalthought of that period. The distinction between the two approacheshas received far less attention than, I believe, it richly deserves. I willbegin with this dichotomy since that will help to locate the particularunderstanding of the theory of justice that I am trying to present inthis work.

One approach, led by the work of Thomas Hobbes in the seven-teenth century, and followed in different ways by such outstandingthinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, concentrated on identifying justinstitutional arrangements for a society. This approach, which can becalled ‘transcendental institutionalism’, has two distinct features.First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice,

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rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice. It triesonly to identify social characteristics that cannot be transcended interms of justice, and its focus is thus not on comparing feasiblesocieties, all of which may fall short of the ideals of perfection. Theinquiry is aimed at identifying the nature of ‘the just’, rather thanfinding some criteria for an alternative being ‘less unjust’ than another.

Second, in searching for perfection, transcendental institutionalismconcentrates primarily on getting the institutions right, and it is notdirectly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge.The nature of the society that would result from any given set ofinstitutions must, of course, depend also on non-institutional features,such as actual behaviours of people and their social interactions. Inelaborating the likely consequences of the institutions, if and when atranscendental institutionalist theory goes into commenting on them,some specific behavioural assumptions are made that help the workingof the chosen institutions.

Both these features relate to the ‘contractarian’ mode of thinkingthat Thomas Hobbes had initiated, and which was further pursuedby John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.3 A hypo-thetical ‘social contract’ that is assumed to be chosen is clearly con-cerned with an ideal alternative to the chaos that might otherwisecharacterize a society, and the contracts that were prominently dis-cussed by the authors dealt primarily with the choice of institutions.The overall result was to develop theories of justice that focused ontranscendental identification of the ideal institutions.*

It is important, however, to note here that transcendental insti-tutionalists in search of perfectly just institutions have sometimes alsopresented deeply illuminating analyses of moral or political impera-tives regarding socially appropriate behaviour. This applies particu-

* Even though the social contract approach to justice initiated by Hobbes combinestranscendentalism with institutionalism, it is worth noting that the two features neednot necessarily be combined. We can, for example, have a transcendental theory thatfocuses on social realizations rather than on institutions (the search for the perfectutilitarian world with people blissfully happy would be a simple example of pursuing‘realization-based transcendence’). Or we can focus on institutional assessments incomparative perspectives rather than undertaking a transcendental search for theperfect package of social institutions (preferring a greater – or indeed lesser – role forthe free market would be an illustration of comparative institutionalism).

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larly to Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, both of whom have par-ticipated in transcendental institutional investigation, but have alsoprovided far-reaching analyses of the requirements of behaviouralnorms. Even though they have focused on institutional choices, theiranalyses can be seen, more broadly, as ‘arrangement-focused’ ap-proaches to justice, with the arrangements including right behaviourby all as well as right institutions.* There is, obviously, a radicalcontrast between an arrangement-focused conception of justice anda realization-focused understanding: the latter must, for example,concentrate on the actual behaviour of people, rather than presumingcompliance by all with ideal behaviour.

In contrast with transcendental institutionalism, a number of otherEnlightenment theorists took a variety of comparative approachesthat were concerned with social realizations (resulting from actualinstitutions, actual behaviour and other influences). Different versionsof such comparative thinking can be found, for example, in the worksof Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, MaryWollstonecraft, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, among a number ofother leaders of innovative thought in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. Even though these authors, with their very different ideas ofthe demands of justice, proposed quite distinct ways of making socialcomparisons, it can be said, at the risk of only a slight exaggeration,that they were all involved in comparisons of societies that alreadyexisted or could feasibly emerge, rather than confining their analysesto transcendental searches for a perfectly just society. Those focusingon realization-focused comparisons were often interested primarily inthe removal of manifest injustice from the world that they saw.

The distance between the two approaches, transcendental insti-tutionalism, on the one hand, and realization-focused comparison, onthe other, is quite momentous. As it happens, it is the first tradition –that of transcendental institutionalism – on which today’s mainstreampolitical philosophy largely draws in its exploration of the theoryof justice. The most powerful and momentous exposition of this

* As Rawls explains: ‘The other limitation on our discussion is that for the most partI examine the principles of justice that would regulate a well-ordered society. Everyoneis presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions.’ (A Theoryof Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 7–8.)

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approach to justice can be found in the work of the leading politicalphilosopher of our time, John Rawls (whose ideas and far-reachingcontributions will be examined in Chapter 2 ‘Rawls and Beyond’).*Indeed, Rawls’s ‘principles of justice’ in his A Theory of Justice aredefined entirely in relation to perfectly just institutions, though healso investigates – very illuminatingly – the norms of right behaviourin political and moral contexts.†

Also a number of the other pre-eminent contemporary theorists ofjustice have, broadly speaking, taken the transcendental institutionalroute – I think here of Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier, RobertNozick, among others. Their theories, which have provided different,but respectively important, insights into the demands of a ‘just society’,share the common aim of identifying just rules and institutions, eventhough their identifications of these arrangements come in very differ-ent forms. The characterization of perfectly just institutions hasbecome the central exercise in the modern theories of justice.

the point of departure

In contrast with most modern theories of justice, which concentrateon the ‘just society’, this book is an attempt to investigate realization-based comparisons that focus on the advancement or retreat of justice.It is, in this respect, not in line with the strong and more philosophi-cally celebrated tradition of transcendental institutionalism thatemerged in the Enlightenment period (led by Hobbes and developedby Locke, Rousseau and Kant, among others), but more in the ‘other’

* He explained in A Theory of Justice (1971): ‘My aim is to present a conception ofjustice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theoryof the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant’ (p. 10). See also hisPolitical Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). The ‘contractarian’routes of Rawls’s theory of justice had already been emphasized by him in his early –pioneering – paper, ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review, 67 (1958).† In suggesting the need for what he calls a ‘reflective equilibrium’, Rawls builds intohis social analysis the necessity to subject one’s values and priorities to critical scrutiny.Also, as was briefly mentioned earlier, the ‘just institutions’ are identified in Rawlsiananalysis with the assumption of compliance of actual conduct with the rightbehavioural rules.

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tradition that also took shape in about the same period or just after(pursued in various ways by Smith, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft,Bentham, Marx, Mill, among others). The fact that I share a point ofdeparture with these diverse thinkers does not, of course, indicate thatI agree with their substantive theories (that should be obvious enough,since they themselves differed so much from each other), and goingbeyond the shared point of departure, we have to look also at somepoints of eventual arrival.* The rest of the book will explore thatjourney.

Importance must be attached to the starting point, in particular theselection of some questions to be answered (for example, ‘how wouldjustice be advanced?’), rather than others (for example, ‘what wouldbe perfectly just institutions?’). This departure has the dual effect,first, of taking the comparative rather than the transcendental route,and second, of focusing on actual realizations in the societies involved,rather than only on institutions and rules. Given the present balanceof emphases in contemporary political philosophy, this will require aradical change in the formulation of the theory of justice.

Why do we need such a dual departure? I begin with transcen-dentalism. I see two problems here. First, there may be no reasonedagreement at all, even under strict conditions of impartiality andopen-minded scrutiny (for example, as identified by Rawls in his‘original position’) on the nature of the ‘just society’: this is the issueof the feasibility of finding an agreed transcendental solution. Second,an exercise of practical reason that involves an actual choice demandsa framework for comparison of justice for choosing among the feasiblealternatives and not an identification of a possibly unavailable perfectsituation that could not be transcended: this is the issue of the redun-dancy of the search for a transcendental solution. I shall presentlydiscuss these problems with the transcendental focus (both feasibilityand redundancy), but before that let me comment briefly on theinstitutional concentration involved in the approach of transcendentalinstitutionalism.

* Also these authors use the word ‘justice’ in many different ways. As Adam Smithnoted, the term ‘justice’ has ‘several different meanings’ (The Theory of Moral Senti-ments, 6th edn (London: T. Cadell, 1790), VII. ii. 1. 10 in the Clarendon Press edition(1976), p. 269). I shall examine Smith’s ideas on justice in the broadest sense.

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This second component of the departure concerns the need to focuson actual realizations and accomplishments, rather than only on theestablishment of what are identified as the right institutions and rules.The contrast here relates, as was mentioned earlier, to a general – andmuch broader – dichotomy between an arrangement-focused view ofjustice, and a realization-focused understanding of justice. The formerline of thought proposes that justice should be conceptualized in termsof certain organizational arrangements – some institutions, some regu-lations, some behavioural rules – the active presence of which wouldindicate that justice is being done. The question to ask in this contextis whether the analysis of justice must be so confined to getting thebasic institutions and general rules right? Should we not also have toexamine what emerges in the society, including the kind of lives thatpeople can actually lead, given the institutions and rules, but alsoother influences, including actual behaviour, that would inescapablyaffect human lives?

I shall consider the arguments for the two respective departuresin turn. I start with the problems of transcendental identification,beginning with the question of feasibility, and shall take up the issueof redundancy later.

feasibility of a uniquetranscendental agreement

There can be serious differences between competing principles ofjustice that survive critical scrutiny and can have claims to impartial-ity. This problem is serious enough, for example, for John Rawls’sassumption that there will be a unanimous choice of a unique set of‘two principles of justice’ in a hypothetical situation of primordialequality (he calls it ‘the original position’), where people’s vestedinterests are not known to the people themselves. This presumes thatthere is basically only one kind of impartial argument, satisfying thedemands of fairness, shorn of vested interests. This, I would argue,may be a mistake.

There can be differences, for example, in the exact comparativeweights to be given to distributional equality, on the one hand, and

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overall or aggregate enhancement, on the other. In his transcendentalidentification, John Rawls pinpoints one such formula (the lexico-graphic maximin rule, to be discussed in Chapter 2), among manythat are available, without convincing arguments that would eliminateall other alternatives that might compete with Rawls’s very specialformula for impartial attention.* There can be many other reasoneddifferences involving the particular formulae on which Rawls concen-trates in his two principles of justice, without showing us why otheralternatives would not continue to command attention in the impartialatmosphere of his original position.

If a diagnosis of perfectly just social arrangements is incurablyproblematic, then the entire strategy of transcendental institutionalismis deeply impaired, even if every conceivable alternative in the worldwere available. For example, the two principles of justice in JohnRawls’s classic investigation of ‘justice as fairness’, which will bemore fully discussed in Chapter 2, are precisely about perfectly justinstitutions in a world where all alternatives are available. However,what we do not know is whether the plurality of reasons for justicewould allow one unique set of principles of justice to emerge in theoriginal position. The elaborate exploration of Rawlsian social justice,which proceeds step by step from the identification and establishmentof just institutions, would then get stuck at the very base.

In his later writings, Rawls makes some concessions to the recog-nition that ‘citizens will of course differ as to which conceptions ofpolitical justice they think most reasonable’. Indeed, he goes on to sayin The Law of Peoples (1999):

The content of public reason is given by a family of political conceptions of

justice, and not by a single one. There are many liberalisms and related views,

and therefore many forms of public reason specified by a family of reason-

able political conceptions. Of these, justice as fairness, whatever its merits, is

but one.4

* Different types of impartial rules of distribution are discussed in my On EconomicInequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; extended edn, with a new Annexe, jointlywith James Foster, 1997). See also Alan Ryan (ed.), Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1993), and David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1999).

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It is not, however, clear how Rawls would deal with the far-reachingimplications of this concession. The specific institutions, firmly chosenfor the basic structure of society, would demand one specific resolutionof the principles of justice, in the way Rawls had outlined in his earlyworks, including (1971).* Once the claim touniqueness of the Rawlsian principles of justice is dropped (the case forwhich is outlined in Rawls’s later works), the institutional programmewould clearly have serious indeterminacy, and Rawls does not tell usmuch about how a particular set of institutions would be chosen onthe basis of a set of competing principles of justice that would demanddifferent institutional combinations for the basic structure of thesociety. Rawls could, of course, resolve that problem by abandoningthe transcendental institutionalism of his earlier work (particularly of

), and this would be the move that would appealmost to this particular author.† But I am afraid I am not able to claimthat this was the direction in which Rawls himself was definitely head-ing, even though some of his later works raise that question forcefully.

three children and a flute:an illustration

At the heart of the particular problem of a unique impartial resolutionof the perfectly just society is the possible sustainability of plural andcompeting reasons for justice, all of which have claims to impartialityand which nevertheless differ from – and rival – each other. Let me

* Rawls discusses the difficulties in arriving at a unique set of principles to guideinstitutional choice in the original position in his later book Justice as Fairness: ARestatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),pp. 132–4. I am most grateful to Erin Kelly for discussing with me the relation betweenRawls’s later writings and his earlier formulations of the theory of justice as fairness.† John Gray’s scepticism about the Rawlsian theory of justice is much more radicalthan mine, but there is an agreement between us in the rejection of the belief thatquestions of value can have only one right answer. I also agree that the ‘diversity ofways of life and regimes is a mark of human freedom, not of error’ (Two Faces ofLiberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 139). My inquiry concerns reasonedagreements that can nevertheless be reached on how injustice can be reduced, despiteour different views on ‘ideal’ regimes.

A Theory of Justice

ATheory of Justice

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illustrate the problem with an example in which you have to decidewhich of three children – Anne, Bob and Carla – should get a fluteabout which they are quarrelling. Anne claims the flute on the groundthat she is the only one of the three who knows how to play it (theothers do not deny this), and that it would be quite unjust to deny theflute to the only one who can actually play it. If that is all you knew,the case for giving the flute to the first child would be strong.

In an alternative scenario, it is Bob who speaks up, and defends hiscase for having the flute by pointing out that he is the only one amongthe three who is so poor that he has no toys of his own. The flute wouldgive him something to play with (the other two concede that they arericherandwell suppliedwith engagingamenities). If youhadheardonlyBobandnoneof theothers, the case for giving it tohimwouldbe strong.

In another alternative scenario, it is Carla who speaks up and pointsout that she has been working diligently for many months to makethe flute with her own labour (the others confirm this), and justwhen she had finished her work, ‘just then’, she complains, ‘theseexpropriators came along to try to grab the flute away from me’. IfCarla’s statement is all you had heard, you might be inclined to givethe flute to her in recognition of her understandable claim to some-thing she has made herself.

Having heard all three and their different lines of reasoning, thereis a difficult decision that you have to make. Theorists of differentpersuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egalitarians, or no-nonsense libertarians, may each take the view that there is a straight-forward just resolution staring at us here, and there is no difficulty inspotting it. But almost certainly they would respectively see totallydifferent resolutions as being obviously right.

Bob, the poorest, would tend to get fairly straightforward supportfrom the economic egalitarian if he is committed to reducing gaps inthe economic means of people. On the other hand, Carla, the makerof the flute, would receive immediate sympathy from the libertarian.The utilitarian hedonist may face the hardest challenge, but he wouldcertainly tend to give weight, more than the libertarian or the econ-omic egalitarian, to the fact that Anne’s pleasure is likely to be strongerbecause she is the only one who can play the flute (there is also thegeneral dictum of ‘waste not, want not’). Nevertheless, the utilitarian

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should also recognize that Bob’s relative deprivation could make hisincremental gain in happiness from getting the flute that much larger.Carla’s ‘right’ to get what she has made may not resonate immediatelywith the utilitarian, but deeper utilitarian reflection would neverthe-less tend to take some note of the requirements of work incentives increating a society in which utility-generation is sustained and encour-aged through letting people keep what they have produced with theirown efforts.*

The libertarian’s support for giving the flute to Carla will not beconditional in the way it is bound to be for the utilitarian on theworking of incentive effects, since a libertarian would take direct noteof a person’s right to have what people have produced themselves.The idea of the right to the fruits of one’s labour can unite right-winglibertarians and left-wing Marxists (no matter how uncomfortableeach might be in the company of the other).†

The general point here is that it is not easy to brush aside asfoundationless any of the claims based respectively on the pursuit ofhuman fulfilment, or removal of poverty, or entitlement to enjoy theproducts of one’s own labour. The different resolutions all have seri-ous arguments in support of them, and we may not be able to identify,without some arbitrariness, any of the alternative arguments as beingthe one that must invariably prevail.‡

I also want to draw attention here to the fairly obvious fact that the

* We are, of course, considering here a simple case in which who has produced whatcan be readily identified. This may well be easy enough with the single-handed makingof a flute by Carla. That kind of diagnosis could, however, raise deep problems whenvarious factors of production, including non-labour resources, are involved.† As it happens, Karl Marx himself became rather sceptical of the ‘right to one’slabour’, which he came to see as a ‘bourgeois right’, to be ultimately rejected in favourof ‘distribution according to needs’, a point of view he developed with some force inhis last substantial work, The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). The importanceof this dichotomy is discussed in my book, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1973), Chapter 4. See also G. A. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom:Themes from Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).‡ As Bernard Williams has argued, ‘Disagreement does not necessarily have to beovercome.’ Indeed, it ‘may remain an important and constitutive feature of ourrelations to others, and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in thelight of the best explanations we have of how such disagreement arises’ (Ethics andthe Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), p. 133).

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differences between the three children’s justificatory arguments do notrepresent divergences about what constitutes individual advantage(getting the flute is taken to be advantageous by each of the childrenand is accommodated by each of the respective arguments), but aboutthe principles that should govern the allocation of resources in general.They are about how social arrangements should be made and whatsocial institutions should be chosen, and through that, about whatsocial realizations would come about. It is not simply that the vestedinterests of the three children differ (though of course they do), butthat the three arguments each point to a different type of impartialand non-arbitrary reason.

This applies not only to the discipline of fairness in the Rawlsianoriginal position, but also to other demands of impartiality, for ex-ample Thomas Scanlon’s requirement that our principles satisfy ‘whatothers could not reasonably reject’.5 As was mentioned earlier, theor-ists of different persuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egali-tarians, or labour right theorists, or no-nonsense libertarians, mayeach take the view that there is one straightforward just resolutionthat is easily detected, but they would each argue for totally differentresolutions as being obviously right. There may not indeed exist anyidentifiable perfectly just social arrangement on which impartial agree-ment would emerge.

a comparative or atranscendental framework?

The problem with the transcendental approach does not arise onlyfrom the possible plurality of competing principles that have claimsto being relevant to the assessment of justice. Important as the problemof the non-existence of an identifiable perfectly just social arrangementis, a critically important argument in favour of the comparativeapproach to the practical reason of justice is not just the infeasibilityof the transcendental theory, but its redundancy. If a theory of justiceis to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, thenthe identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessarynor sufficient.

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To illustrate, if we are trying to choose between a Picasso and aDali, it is of no help to invoke a diagnosis (even if such a transcendentaldiagnosis could be made) that the ideal picture in the world is theMona Lisa. That may be interesting to hear, but it is neither here northere in the choice between a Dali and a Picasso.6 Indeed, it is not atall necessary to talk about what may be the greatest or most perfectpicture in the world, to choose between the two alternatives that weare facing. Nor is it sufficient, or indeed of any particular help, toknow that the Mona Lisa is the most perfect picture in the worldwhen the choice is actually between a Dali and a Picasso.

This point may look deceptively simple. Would not a theory thatidentifies a transcendental alternative also, through the same process,tell us what we want to know about comparative justice? The answeris no – it does not. We may, of course, be tempted by the idea that wecan rank alternatives in terms of their respective closeness to theperfect choice, so that a transcendental identification may indirectlyyield also a ranking of alternatives. But that approach does not get usvery far, partly because there are different dimensions in whichobjects differ (so that there is the further issue of assessing the relativeimportance of distances in distinct dimensions), and also becausedescriptive closeness is not necessarily a guide to valuational prox-imity (a person who prefers red wine to white may prefer either to amixture of the two, even though the mixture is, in an obvious des-criptive sense, closer to the preferred red wine than pure white winewould be).

It is, of course, possible to have a theory that does both comparativeassessments between pairs of alternatives, and a transcendental identi-fication (when that is not made impossible through the survivingplurality of impartial reasons that have claims on our attention). Thatwould be a ‘conglomerate’ theory, but neither of the two differenttypes of judgements follows from each other. More immediately,the standard theories of justice that are associated with the approachof transcendental identification (for example, those of Hobbes,Rousseau, Kant or, in our time, Rawls or Nozick) are not, in fact,conglomerate theories. It is, however, true that in the process ofdeveloping their respective transcendental theories, some of theseauthors have presented particular arguments that happen to carry

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over to the comparative exercise. But in general the identification ofa transcendental alternative does not offer a solution to the problemof comparisons between any two non-transcendental alternatives.

Transcendental theory simply addresses a different question fromthat f comparative assessment – a question that may be of consider-able intellectual interest, but which is of no direct relevance to theproblem of choice that has to be faced. What is needed instead is anagreement, based on public reasoning, on rankings of alternatives thatcan be realized. The separation between the transcendental and thecomparative is quite comprehensive, as will be more fully discussed inChapter 4 (‘Voice and Social Choice’). As it happens, the comparativeapproach is central to the analytical discipline of ‘social choice theory’,initiated by the Marquis de Condorcet and other French mathema-ticians in the eighteenth century, mainly working in Paris.7 The formaldiscipline of social choice was not much used for a long time, thoughwork continued in the specific sub-area of voting theory. The disciplinewas revived and established in its present form by Kenneth Arrow inthe middle of the twentieth century.8 This approach has become, inrecent decades, quite an active field of analytical investigation, explor-ing ways and means of basing comparative assessments of socialalternatives on the values and priorities of the people involved.* Sincethe literature of social choice theory is typically quite technical andlargely mathematical, and since many of the results in the field cannotbe established except through fairly extensive mathematical reason-ing,† its basic approach has received relatively little attention,

* On the general characteristics of the social choice approach which motivates andsupports the analytical results, see my Alfred Nobel Lecture in Stockholm in December1998, later published as ‘The Possibility of Social Choice’, American EconomicReview, vol. 89 (1999), and in Les Prix Nobel 1998 (Stockholm: The Nobel Founda-tion, 1999).† The mathematical formulations are, however, of some importance for the contentof the arguments presented through axioms and theorems. For discussion of some ofthe linkages between formal and informal arguments, see my Collective Choice andSocial Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), in which the mathematical and informal chapters alternate. See alsomy critical survey of the literature in ‘Social Choice Theory’, in Kenneth Arrowand Michael Intriligator (eds) Handbook of Mathematical Economics (Amsterdam:North-Holland, 1986).

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especially from philosophers. And yet the approach and its underlyingreasoning are quite close to the commonsense understanding of thenature of appropriate social decisions. In the constructive approach Itry to present in this work, insights from social choice theory willhave a substantial role to play.*

realizations, livesand capabilities

I turn now to the second part of the departure, to wit the need for atheory that is not confined to the choice of institutions, nor to theidentification of ideal social arrangements. The need for an accom-plishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argumentthat justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actuallylive. The importance of human lives, experiences and realizationscannot be supplanted by information about institutions that existand the rules that operate. Institutions and rules are, of course, veryimportant in influencing what happens, and they are part and parcelof the actual world as well, but the realized actuality goes well beyondthe organizational picture, and includes the lives that people manage– or do not manage – to live.

In noting the nature of human lives, we have reason to be interestednot only in the various things we succeed in doing, but also in thefreedoms that we actually have to choose between different kinds oflives. The freedom to choose our lives can make a significant contri-bution to our well-being, but going beyond the perspective of well-being, the freedom itself may be seen as important. Being able toreason and choose is a significant aspect of human life. In fact, we areunder no obligation to seek only our own well-being, and it is for usto decide what we have good reason to pursue (this question will befurther discussed in Chapters 8 and 9). We do not have to be a Gandhi,or a Martin Luther King Jr., or a Nelson Mandela, or a DesmondTutu, to recognize that we can have aims or priorities that differ from

* The connections between social choice theory and the theory of justice are particu-larly explored in Chapter 4, ‘Voice and Social Choice’.

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the single-minded pursuit of our own well-being only.* The freedomsand capabilities we enjoy can also be valuable to us, and it is ultimatelyfor us to decide how to use the freedom we have.

It is important to emphasize, even in this brief account (a fullerexploration is pursued later in the book, particularly in Chapters11–13), that if social realizations are assessed in terms of capabilitiesthat people actually have, rather than in terms of their utilities orhappiness (as Jeremy Bentham and other utilitarians recommend),then some very significant departures are brought about. First, humanlives are then seen inclusively, taking note of the substantive freedomsthat people enjoy, rather than ignoring everything other than thepleasures or utilities they end up having. There is also a second signifi-cant aspect of freedom: it makes us accountable for what we do.

Freedom to choose gives us the opportunity to decide what weshould do, but with that opportunity comes the responsibility forwhat we do – to the extent that they are chosen actions. Since acapability is the power to do something, the accountability that ema-nates from that ability – that power – is a part of the capabilityperspective, and this can make room for demands of duty – what canbe broadly called deontological demands. There is an overlap herebetween agency-centred concerns and the implications of capability-based approach; but there is nothing immediately comparable in theutilitarian perspective (tying one’s responsibility to one’s own happi-ness).† The perspective of social realizations, including the actualcapabilities that people can have, takes us inescapably to a largevariety of further issues that turn out to be quite central to the analysisof justice in the world, and these will have to be examined andscrutinized.

* Adam Smith argued that even for selfish people, ‘there are evidently some principlesin his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others’ and went on to suggest: ‘Thegreatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogetherwithout it’ (The Theory of Moral entiments, 1.i.1.1. in the 1976 edn, p. 9).† This issue will be further discussed in Chapters 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’,and 13, ‘Happiness, Well-being and Capabilities’.

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a classical distinction inindian jurisprudence

In understanding the contrast between an arrangement-focused and arealization-focused view of justice, it is useful to invoke an old distinc-tion from the Sanskrit literature on ethics and jurisprudence. Considertwo different words – niti and nyaya – both of which stand for justicein classical Sanskrit. Among the principal uses of the term niti areorganizational propriety and behavioural correctness. In contrast withniti, the term nyaya stands for a comprehensive concept of realizedjustice. In that line of vision, the roles of institutions, rules and organiz-ation, important as they are, have to be assessed in the broader andmore inclusive perspective of nyaya, which is inescapably linked withthe world that actually emerges, not just the institutions or rules wehappen to have.*

To consider a particular application, early Indian legal theoriststalked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya, ‘justice inthe world of fish’, where a big fish can freely devour a small fish. Weare warned that avoiding matsyanyaya must be an essential partof justice, and it is crucial to make sure that the ‘justice of fish’ isnot allowed to invade the world of human beings. The centralrecognition here is that the realization of justice in the sense ofnyaya is not just a matter of judging institutions and rules, but ofjudging the societies themselves. No matter how proper the estab-

* The most famous of the ancient Indian legal theorists, viz. Manu, was extensivelyconcerned, as it happens, with nitis; indeed, often of the most severe kind (I haveheard Manu being described in contemporary Indian discussions, with some modicumof veracity, as ‘a fascist law-giver’). But Manu too could not escape being drawn intorealizations and nyaya, in justifying the rightness of particular nitis; for example, weare told: it is better to be scorned than to scorn, ‘for the man who is scorned sleepshappily, awakes happily, and goes about happily in this world; but the man whoscorns perishes’ (Chapter 2, instruction 163). Similarly, ‘where women are not reveredall rites are fruitless’, since ‘where the women of the family are miserable, the familyis soon destroyed, but it always thrives where women are not miserable’ (Chapter 3,instructions 56 and 57). The translations are taken from Wendy Doniger’s excellenttranslation, The Laws of Manu (London: Penguin, 1991).

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lished organizations might be, if a big fish could still devour a smallfish at will, then that must be a patent violation of human justice asnyaya.

Let me consider an example to make the distinction between nitiand nyaya clearer. Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman emperor, famouslyclaimed in the sixteenth century: ‘Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus’,which can be translated as ‘Let justice be done, though the worldperish’. This severe maxim could figure as a niti – a very austereniti – that is advocated by some (indeed, Emperor Ferdinand didjust that), but it would be hard to accommodate a total catastropheas an example of a just world, when we understand justice in thebroader form of nyaya. If indeed the world does perish, therewould be nothing much to celebrate in that accomplishment, eventhough the stern and severe niti leading to this extreme result couldconceivably be defended with very sophisticated arguments ofdifferent kinds.

A realization-focused perspective also makes it easier to under-stand the importance of the prevention of manifest injustice in theworld, rather than seeking the perfectly just. As the example of matsy-anyaya makes clear, the subject of justice is not merely about tryingto achieve – or dreaming about achieving – some perfectly just societyor social arrangements, but about preventing manifestly severe injus-tice (such as avoiding the dreadful state of matsyanyaya). For ex-ample, when people agitated for the abolition of slavery in the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries, they were not labouring under theillusion that the abolition of slavery would make the world perfectlyjust. It was their claim, rather, that a society with slavery was totallyunjust (among the authors mentioned earlier, Adam Smith, Condorcetand Mary Wollstonecraft were quite involved in presenting this per-spective). It was the diagnosis of an intolerable injustice in slaverythat made abolition an overwhelming priority, and this did not re-quire the search for a consensus on what a perfectly just societywould look like. Those who think, reasonably enough, that theAmerican Civil War, which led to the abolition of slavery, was a bigstrike for justice in America would have to be reconciled to the factthat not much can be said in the perspective of transcendental insti-tutionalism (where he only contrast is that between the perfectly just t

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and the rest) about the enhancement of justice through the abolitionof slavery.*

the importance of processesand responsibilities

Those who tend to see justice in terms of niti rather than nyaya, nomatter what they call that dichotomy, may be influenced by their fearthat a concentration on actual realizations would tend to ignore thesignificance of social processes, including the exercise of individualduties and responsibilities. We may do the right thing and yet we maynot succeed. Or, a good result may come about not because we aimedat it, but for some other, perhaps even an accidental, reason, and wemay be deceived into thinking that justice has been done. It couldhardly be adequate (so the argument would run) to concentrate onlyon what actually happens, ignoring altogether the processes andefforts and conducts. Philosophers who emphasize the role of dutyand other features of what is called a deontological approach maybe particularly suspicious of the fact that the distinction betweenarrangements and realizations could look quite like the old contrastbetween deontological and consequential approaches to justice.

This worry is important to consider, but it is, I would argue, ulti-mately misplaced. A full characterization of realizations should haveroom to include the exact processes through which the eventual statesof affairs emerge. In a paper in Econometrica about a decade ago, Icalled this the ‘comprehensive outcome’ which includes the processesinvolved, and which has to be distinguished from only the ‘culmi-nation outcome’,9 for example, an arbitrary arrest is more than the

* It is interesting that Karl Marx’s diagnosis of ‘the one great event of contemporaryhistory’ made him attribute that distinction to the American Civil War leading to theabolition of slavery (see Capital, vol. I (London: Sonnenschein, 1887), Chapter X,Section 3, p. 240). While Marx argued that capitalist labour arrangements areexploitative, he was keen on pointing out what a huge improvement wage labour wascompared with a system of slave labour; on this subject, see also Marx’s Grundrisse(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973). Marx’s analysis of justice went well beyondhis fascination, much discussed by his critics, with ‘the ultimate stage of communism’.

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capture and detention of someone – it is what it says, an arbitraryarrest. Similarly, the role of human agency cannot be obliterated bysome exclusive focus on what happens only at the culmination; forexample, there is a real difference between some people dying ofstarvation due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control and thosepeople being starved to death through the design of those wanting tobring about that outcome (both are, of course, tragedies, but theirconnection with justice cannot be the same). Or, to take another typeof case, if a presidential candidate in an election were to argue thatwhat is really important for him or her is not just to win the forth-coming election, but ‘to win the election fairly’, then the outcomesought must be something of a comprehensive outcome.

Or consider a different kind of example. In the Indian epic Mahab-harata, in the particular part of it called Bhagavadgita (or Gita, forshort), on the eve of the battle that is the central episode of the epic,the invincible warrior, Arjuna, expresses his profound doubts aboutleading the fight which will result in so much killing. He is told by hisadviser, Krishna, that he, Arjuna, must give priority to his duty, thatis, to fight, irrespective of the consequences. That famous debate isoften interpreted as one about deontology versus consequentialism,with Krishna, the deontologist, urging Arjuna to do his duty, whileArjuna, the alleged consequentialist, worries about the terrible con-sequences of the war.

Krishna’s hallowing of the demands of duty is meant to win theargument, at least as seen in the religious perspective. Indeed, theBhagavadgita has become a treatise of great theological importance inHindu philosophy, focusing particularly on the ‘removal’ of Arjuna’sdoubts. Krishna’s moral position has also been eloquently endorsedby many philosophical and literary commentators across the world.In the Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot summarizes Krishna’s view in theform of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action./Fare forward.’ Eliot explains, so that we do not miss the point: ‘Notfare well, / But fare forward, voyagers’.10 I have argued elsewhere (inThe Argumentative Indian) that if we leave the narrow confines ofthe end of the debate in the part of Mahabharata that is called Bhaga-vadgita, and look at the earlier sections of Gita in which Arjunapresents his argument, or look at Mahabharata as a whole, the

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limitations of Krishna’s perspective are also quite evident.11 Indeed,after the total desolation of the land following the successful end ofthe ‘just war’, towards the end of the Mahabharata, with funeral pyresburning in unison and women weeping about the death of their lovedones, it is hard to be convinced that Arjuna’s broader perspective wasdecisively vanquished by Krishna. There may remain a powerful casefor faring ‘well’, and not just ‘forward’.

While that contrast may well fit broadly into the differentiationbetween the consequentialist and the deontological perspectives, whatis particularly relevant here is to go beyond that simple contrast toexamine what the totality of Arjuna’s concerns were about the pros-pect of his not faring well. Arjuna is not concerned only about thefact that, if the war were to occur, with him leading the charge on theside of justice and propriety, many people would get killed. That too,but Arjuna also expresses concern, in the early part of Gita itself, thathe himself would inescapably be doing a lot of the killing, often ofpeople for whom he has affection and with whom he has personalrelations, in the battle between the two wings of the same family, inwhich others, well known to the two sides, had also joined. Indeed,the actual event that Arjuna worries about goes well beyond theprocess-independent view of consequences. An appropriate under-standing of social realization – central to justice as nyaya – has to takethe comprehensive form of a process-inclusive broad account.12 Itwould be hard to dismiss the perspective of social realizations on thegrounds that it is narrowly consequentialist and ignores the reasoningunderlying deontological concerns.

transcendental institutionalismand global neglect

I end this introductory discussion with a final observation on a particu-larly restrictive aspect of the prevailing concentration in mainstreampolitical philosophy on transcendental institutionalism. Consider anyof the great many changes that can be proposed for reforming theinstitutional structure of the world today to make it less unfair andunjust (in terms of widely accepted criteria). Take, for example, the

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reform of the patent laws to make well-established and cheaply pro-ducible drugs more easily available to needy but poor patients (forexample, those who are suffering from AIDS) – an issue clearly ofsome importance for global justice. The question that we have to askhere is: what international reforms do we need to make the world abit less unjust?

However, that kind of discussion about enhancement of justice ingeneral, and enlargement of global justice in particular, would appearto be merely ‘loose talk’ to those who are persuaded by the Hobbesian– and Rawlsian – claim that we need a sovereign state to apply theprinciples of justice through the choice of a perfect set of institutions:this is a straightforward implication of taking questions of justicewithin the framework of transcendental institutionalism. Perfectglobal justice through an impeccably just set of institutions, even ifsuch a thing could be identified, would certainly demand a sovereignglobal state, and in the absence of such a state, questions of globaljustice appear to the transcendentalists to be unaddressable.

Consider the strong dismissal of the relevance of ‘the idea of globaljustice’ by one of the most original, most powerful and most humanephilosophers of our time, my friend Thomas Nagel, from whose workI have learned so much. In a hugely engaging article in Philosophyand Public Affairs in 2005, he draws exactly on his transcendentalunderstanding of justice to conclude that global justice is not a viablesubject for discussion, since the elaborate institutional demandsneeded for a just world cannot be met at the global level at this time.As he puts it, ‘It seems to me very difficult to resist Hobbes’s claimabout the relation between justice and sovereignty’, and ‘if Hobbes isright, the idea of global justice without a world government is achimera’.13

In the global context, Nagel concentrates, therefore, on clarifyingother demands, distinguishable from the demands of justice, such as‘minimal humanitarian morality’ (which ‘governs our relation to allother persons’), and also to long-term strategies for radical change ininstitutional arrangements (‘I believe the most likely path toward someversion of global justice is through the creation of patently unjust andillegitimate global structures of power that are tolerable to the interestsof the most powerful current nation-states’).14 The contrast that is

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involved here is between seeing institutional reforms in terms of theirrole in taking us towards transcendental justice (as outlined by Nagel),and assessing them in terms of the improvement that such reformsactually bring about, particularly through the elimination of what areseen as cases of manifest injustice (which is an integral part of theapproach presented in this book).

In the Rawlsian approach too, the application of a theory of justicerequires an extensive cluster of institutions that determines the basicstructure of a fully just society. Not surprisingly, Rawls actually aban-dons his own principles of justice when it comes to the assessment ofhow to think about global justice, and he does not go in the fancifuldirection of wanting a global state. In a later contribution, The Lawof Peoples, Rawls invokes a kind of ‘supplement’ to his national (or,within-one-country) pursuit of the demands of ‘justice as fairness’.But this supplement comes in a very emaciated form, through a kindof negotiation between the representatives of different countries onsome very elementary matters of civility and humanity – what can beseen as very limited features of justice. In fact, Rawls does not try toderive ‘principles of justice’ that might emanate from these negoti-ations (indeed, none would emerge that can be given that name), andconcentrates instead on certain general principles of humanitarianbehaviour.15

Indeed, the theory of justice, as formulated under the currentlydominant transcendental institutionalism, reduces many of the mostrelevant issues of justice into empty – even if acknowledged to be‘well-meaning’ – rhetoric. When people across the world agitate toget more global justice – and I emphasize here the comparative word‘more’ – they are not clamouring for some kind of ‘minimal humani-tarianism’. Nor are they agitating for a ‘perfectly just’ world society,but merely for the elimination of some outrageously unjust arrange-ments to enhance global justice, as Adam Smith, or Condorcet orMary Wollstonecraft did in their own time, and on which agree-ments can be generated through public discussion, despite a continu-ing divergence of views on other matters.

The aggrieved people might, instead, find their voice well reflectedin an energizing poem by Seamus Heaney:

introduction

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History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.16

Hugely engaging as this longing is for hope and history to rhymetogether, the justice of transcendental institutionalism has little roomfor that engagement. This limitation provides one illustration of theneed for a substantial departure in the prevailing theories of justice.That is the subject matter of this book.

part i

The Demands of Justice

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1

Reason and Objectivity

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of our time, wrotein the Preface to his first major book in philosophy, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921: ‘What can be said at all can be saidclearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’*Wittgenstein would re-examine his views on speech and clarity in hislater work, but it is a relief that, even as he was writing the Tractatus,the great philosopher did not always follow his own exacting com-mandment. In a letter to Paul Engelmann, written in 1917, Wittgen-stein made the wonderfully enigmatic remark: ‘I work quite diligentlyand wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one andthe same.’1 Really? One and the same thing – being a smarter humanbeing and a better person?

I am, of course, aware that modern transatlantic usage has drownedthe distinction between ‘being good’ as a moral quality and ‘beingwell’ as a comment on a person’s health (no aches and pains, fineblood pressure, and so on), and I have long ceased worrying aboutthe manifest immodesty of those of my friends who, when askedhow they are, reply with apparent self-praise, ‘I am very good.’ ButWittgenstein was not an American, and 1917 was well before theconquest of the world by vibrant American usage. When Wittgenstein

* It is interesting to note that Edmund Burke also talked about the difficulty ofspeaking in some circumstances (see Introduction, where I cited Burke on this issue),but Burke proceeded to speak on the subject nevertheless, since it was, he argued,‘impossible to be silent’ on a grave matter of the kind he was dealing with (the casefor impeaching Warren Hastings). Wittgenstein’s counsel for silence when we cannotspeak clearly enough would appear to be, in many ways, the opposite of Burke’sapproach.

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said that being ‘better’ and being ‘smarter’ were ‘one and the samething’, he must have been making a substantial assertion.

Underlying the point may be the recognition, in some form, thatmany acts of nastiness are committed by people who are deluded, inone way or another, about the subject. Lack of smartness can certainlybe one source of moral failing in good behaviour. Reflecting on whatwould really be a smart thing to do can sometimes help one act bettertowards others. That this can easily be the case has been brought outvery clearly by modern game theory.2 Among the prudential reasonsfor good behaviour may well be one’s own gain from such behaviour.Indeed, there could be great gain for all members of a group byfollowing rules of good behaviour which can help everyone. It is notparticularly smart for a group of people to act in a way that ruinsthem all.3

But maybe that is not what Wittgenstein meant. Being smarter canalso give us the ability to think more clearly about our goals, objectivesand values. If self-interest is, ultimately, a primitive thought (despitethe complexities just mentioned), clarity about the more sophisticatedpriorities and obligations that we would want to cherish and pursuewould tend to depend on our power of reasoning. A person may havewell-thought-out reasons other than the promotion of personal gainfor acting in a socially decent way.

Being smarter may help the understanding not only of one’s self-interest, but also how the lives of others can be strongly affected byone’s own actions. Proponents of so-called ‘Rational Choice Theory’(first proposed in economics and then enthusiastically adopted by anumber of political and legal thinkers) have tried hard to make usaccept the peculiar understanding that rational choice consists onlyin clever promotion of self-interest (which is how, oddly enough,‘rational choice’ is defined by the proponents of brand-named ‘rationalchoice theory’). Nevertheless, our heads have not all been colonizedby that remarkably alienating belief. There is considerable resistanceto the idea that it must be patently irrational – and stupid – to try todo anything for others except to the extent that doing good to otherswould enhance one’s own well-being.4

‘What we owe to each other’ is an important subject for intelligentreflection.5 That reflection can take us beyond the pursuit of a very

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narrow view of self-interest, and we can even find that our ownwell-reflected goals demand that we cross the narrow boundaries ofexclusive self-seeking altogether. There can also be cases in which wehave reason to restrain the exclusive pursuit of our own goals (whetheror not these goals are themselves exclusively self-interested), becauseof following rules of decent behaviour that allow room for the pursuitof goals (whether or not self-interested) by other people who sharethe world with us.*

Since there were precursors to brand-named ‘rational choice theory’even in Wittgenstein’s days, perhaps his point was that being smarterhelps us to think more clearly about our social concerns and responsi-bilities. It has been argued that some children carry out acts of brut-ality on other children, or animals, precisely because of their inabilityto appreciate adequately the nature and intensity of the pains ofothers, and that this appreciation generally accompanies the intellec-tual development of maturity.

We cannot, of course, really be sure about what Wittgensteinmeant.† But there is certainly much evidence that he himself devoteda great deal of his time and intellect to thinking about his own res-ponsibilities and commitments. The result was not invariably veryintelligent or wise. Wittgenstein was absolutely determined to go toVienna in 1938, just as Hitler was holding his triumphant processionthrough the city, despite his own Jewishness and his inability to besilent and diplomatic; he had to be restrained from going there byhis colleagues in his Cambridge college.‡ There is, however, much

* Some commentators find it puzzling that we can reasonably allow the compromisingof a single-minded pursuit of our own goals through making room for others to pursuetheir goals (some even see in this some kind of a ‘proof’ that what we took to be ourgoals were not in fact the actual goals we had), but there is no puzzle here when thereach of practical reasoning is adequately appreciated. These issues will be discussedin Chapters 8 ‘Rationality and Other People’ and 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’.† Tibor Machan has illuminatingly pursued this interpretational issue in ‘A Better andSmarter Person: A Wittgensteinian Idea of Human Excellence’, presented at the 5thInternational Wittgenstein Symposium, 1980.‡ Piero Sraffa, the economist, who had a significant influence on Ludwig Wittgensteinin his re-examination of his earlier philosophical position in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (thereby helping to pave the way towards Wittgenstein’s later works,including Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)), played a leadingrole in dissuading Wittgenstein from going to Vienna and delivering a severe lecture

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evidence from what we know from Wittgenstein’s conversations thathe did think that his intellectual capacity should definitely be used tomake the world a better place.*

critique of theenlightenment tradition

If that is indeed what Wittgenstein meant, then he was, in an importantsense, within the powerful tradition of European Enlightenment,which saw clear-headed reasoning as a major ally in the desire to makesocieties better. Social improvement through systematic reasoningwas a prominent strand in the arguments that were integral to theintellectual animation of the European Enlightenment, especially inthe eighteenth century.

It is, however, difficult to generalize about any overwhelming domi-nance of reason in the thinking prevalent in what is seen as theEnlightenment period. As Isaiah Berlin has shown, there were alsodifferent kinds of counter-rational strands during the ‘Age of Enlight-enment’.6 But certainly a strong – and somewhat self-conscious –reliance on reason was one of the major departures of Enlightenmentthought from the traditions prevailing earlier. And it has becomequite common in contemporary political discussions to argue that theEnlightenment oversold the reach of reason. Indeed, it has also beenargued that the over-reliance on reason, which the Enlightenmenttradition helped to instil in modern thinking, has contributed to thepropensity towards atrocities in the post-Enlightenment world.Jonathan Glover, the distinguished philosopher, adds his voice, in hispowerfully argued ‘Moral History of the Twentieth Century’, to this

to the triumphant Hitler. Their intellectual and personal relationships are reviewed inmy essay, ‘Sraffa, Wittgenstein and Gramsci’, Journal of Economic Literature, 41(December 2003). Sraffa and Wittgenstein were close friends and also colleagues, asFellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. See Chapter 5, ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’,for a discussion of Sraffa’s intellectual engagement with, first, Antonio Gramsci, andthen, Wittgenstein, and the relevance of the contents of these tripartite exchanges forsome of the themes of this work.* This commitment relates to what his biographer Ray Monk calls ‘the duty of genius’(Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage, 1991).

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line of reproach, arguing that ‘the Enlightenment view of human psy-chology’ has increasingly looked ‘thin andmechanical’, and ‘Enlighten-ment hopes of social progress through the spread of humanitarianismand the scientific outlook’ now appear rather ‘naive’.7 He goes on tolink modern tyranny with that perspective (as have other critics of theEnlightenment), arguing that not only were ‘Stalin and his heirs’altogether ‘in thrall to the Enlightenment’, but also that Pol Pot ‘wasindirectly influenced by it’.8 But since Glover does not wish to seekhis solution through the authority of religion or of tradition (he notesthat, in this respect, ‘we cannot escape the Enlightenment’), he concen-trates his fire on forcefully held beliefs, to which overconfident useof reasoning substantially contributes. ‘The crudity of Stalinism’, heargues, ‘had its origin in the beliefs.’9

It would be hard to dispute Glover’s pointer to the power of strongbeliefs and terrible convictions, or indeed to challenge his thesis of‘the role of ideology in Stalinism’. The question to be asked here doesnot relate to the nasty power of bad ideas, but rather to the diagnosisthat this is somehow a criticism of the reach of reason in general andthe Enlightenment perspective in particular.10 Is it really right to placethe blame for the propensity towards premature certainties and theunquestioned beliefs of gruesome political leaders on the Enlighten-ment tradition, given the pre-eminent importance that so manyEnlightenment authors attached to the role of reasoning in makingchoices, particularly against reliance on blind belief? Surely, ‘thecrudity of Stalinism’ could be opposed, as indeed it was by dissidentsthrough a reasoned demonstration of the huge gap between promiseand practice, and by showing the brutality of the regime despite itspretensions – a brutality that the authorities had to conceal fromscrutiny through censorship and expurgation.

Indeed, one of the main points in favour of reason is that it helpsus to scrutinize ideology and blind belief.* Reason was not, in fact,

* It is, of course, true that many crude beliefs originate in some kinds of reason –possibly of rather primitive kinds (for example, racist and sexist prejudices surviveoften enough on the basis of the perceived ‘reason’ that non-whites or women arebiologically or intellectually inferior). The case for reliance on reason does not involveany denial of the easily recognized fact that people do give reasons of some kind orother in defence of their beliefs (no matter how crude). The point of reasoning as a

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Pol Pot’s main ally. Frenzy and unreasoned conviction played thatrole, with no room for reasoned scrutiny. The interesting and impor-tant issues that Glover’s critique of the Enlightenment tradition force-fully raises include the question: where is the remedy to bad reasoningto be found? There is also the related question: what is the relationshipbetween reason and emotions, including compassion and sympathy?And beyond that, it must also be asked: what is the ultimate justifica-tion for reliance on reason? Is reason cherished as a good tool, and ifso, a tool for pursuing what? Or is reason its own justification, and ifso, how does it differ from blind and unquestioning belief? Theseissues have been discussed over the ages, but there is a special need toface them here, given the focus on reasoning in the exploration of theidea of justice in this work.

akbar and the necessityof reason

W. B. Yeats wrote on the margin of his copy of Nietzsche’s TheGenealogy of Morals, ‘But why does Nietzsche think the night has nostars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon?’11 Nietzsche’sscepticism about humanity and his chilling vision of the future werepresented just before the beginning of the twentieth century (he diedin 1900). The events of the century that followed, including worldwars, holocausts, genocides and other atrocities, give us reason enoughto worry whether Nietzsche’s scepticism about humankind might nothave been just right.* Indeed, in investigating Nietzsche’s concerns atthe end of the twentieth century, Jonathan Glover concludes that we‘need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us’, andconsider ways and means of ‘caging and taming them’.12

discipline is to subject the prevailing beliefs and alleged reasons to critical examination.These issues will be further discussed in Chapters 8, ‘Rationality and Other People’,and 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’.* As Javed Akhtar, the Urdu poet, puts it in a ghazal: ‘Religion or war, caste or race,these things it does not know/ Before our savagery how do we judge the wild beast’(Jav d Akhtar, Quiver: Poems and Ghazals, translated by David Matthews (NewDelhi: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 47).

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Occasions such as the turn of a century have appeared to manypeople to be appropriate moments to engage in critical examinationsof what is happening and what needs to be done. The reflections arenot always as pessimistic and sceptical of human nature and thepossibility of reasoned change as those of Nietzsche (or of Glover).An interesting contrast can be seen in the much earlier deliberationsof the Mughal emperor, Akbar, in India, at a point of even ‘millennial’,rather than merely centurial, interest. As the first millennium of theMuslim Hijri calendar came to an end in 1591–2 (it was a thousandlunar years after Muhammad’s epic journey from Mecca to Medinain ad 622),* Akbar engaged in a far-reaching scrutiny of social andpolitical values and legal and cultural practice. He paid particularattention to the challenges of inter-community relations and theabiding need for communal peace and fruitful collaboration in thealready multicultural India of the sixteenth century. We have to recog-nize how unusual Akbar’s policies were for the time. The Inquisitionswere in full swing and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake forheresy in Rome in 1600 even as Akbar was making his pronounce-ments on religious tolerance in India. Not only did Akbar insist thatthe duty of the state included making sure that ‘no man should beinterfered with on account of his religion, and any one was to beallowed to go over to any religion he pleased’,13 he also arrangedsystematic dialogues in his capital city of Agra between Hindus,Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and others, even includingagnostics and atheists.

Taking note of the religious diversity of his people, Akbar laid thefoundations of secularism and religious neutrality of the state in avariety of ways; the secular constitution that India adopted in 1949,after independence from British rule, has many features already cham-pioned by Akbar in the 1590s. The shared elements include inter-preting secularism as the requirement that the state be equidistantfrom different religions and must not treat any religion with specialfavour.

Underlying Akbar’s general approach to the assessment of social

* A lunar year has a mean length of 354 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes, and thusmoves ahead significantly faster than a solar year.

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custom and public policy was his overarching thesis that ‘the pursuitof reason’ (rather than what he called ‘the marshy land of tradition’)is the way to address difficult problems of good behaviour and thechallenges of constructing a just society.14 The question of secularismis only one of a great many cases in which Akbar insisted that weshould be free to examine whether reason does or does not supportany existing custom, or provides justification for ongoing policy; forexample, he abolished all special taxes on non-Muslims on the groundthat they were discriminatory since they did not treat all citizens asequal. In 1582 he resolved to release ‘all the Imperial slaves’, since ‘itis beyond the realm of justice and good conduct’ to benefit from‘force’.15

Illustrations of Akbar’s criticisms of prevailing social practice arealso easy to find in the arguments he presented. He was, for example,opposed to child marriage, which was then quite conventional (andalas, not even fully eradicated now in the subcontinent), since, heargued, ‘the object that is intended’ in marriage ‘is still remote,and there is immediate possibility of injury’. He also criticized theHindu practice of not allowing the remarriage of widows (a practicethat would be reformed only several centuries later) and added that‘in a religion that forbids the remarriage of the widow’, the hardshipof permitting child marriage ‘is much greater’. On the inheritance ofproperty, Akbar noted that ‘in the Muslim religion, a smaller share ofinheritance is allowed to the daughter, though owing to her weakness,she deserves to be given a larger share’. A very different kind ofexample of reasoning can be seen in his allowing religious rituals ofwhich he himself took a very sceptical view. When his second son,Murad, who knew that Akbar was opposed to all religious rituals,asked him whether these rituals should be banned, Akbar immediatelyopposed that, on the ground that ‘preventing that insensitive simple-ton, who considers body exercise to be divine worship, would amountto preventing him from remembering God [at all]’.

While Akbar himself remained a practising Muslim, he argued forthe need for everyone to subject their inherited beliefs and prioritiesto critical scrutiny. Indeed, perhaps the most important point thatAkbar made in his defence of a secular and a tolerant multiculturalsociety concerned the role that he gave to reasoning in this entire

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enterprise. Akbar took reason to be supreme, since even in disputingreason we would have to give reasons for that disputation. Attackedby strong traditionalists within his own religious affiliation, whoargued in favour of unquestioning and instinctive faith in the Islamictradition, Akbar told his friend and trusted lieutenant, Abul Fazl (aformidable scholar in Sanskrit as well as Arabic and Persian): ‘Thepursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantlypatent as to be above the need of argument.’16 He concluded that the‘path of reason’ or ‘the rule of the intellect’ (rahi aql) must be the basicdeterminant of good and just behaviour as well as of an acceptableframework of legal duties and entitlements.*

ethical objectivity andreasoned scrutiny

Akbar was right to point to the indispensability of reason. As will bepresently argued, even the importance of emotions can be appreciatedwithin the reach of reason. Indeed, the significant place of emotionsfor our deliberations can be illustrated by the reasons for taking themseriously (though not uncritically). If we are strongly moved by someparticular emotion, there is good reason to ask what that tells us.Reason and emotion play complementary roles in human reflection,and the complex relationship between them will be considered morefully later on in this chapter.

It is not hard to see that ethical judgements demand rahi aql – theuse of reason. The question that remains, however, is this: why shouldwe accept that reason has to be the ultimate arbitrator of ethicalbeliefs? Is there some special role for reasoning – perhaps reasoningof a particular kind – that must be seen as overarching and crucial forethical judgements? Since reasoned support can hardly be in itselfa value-giving quality, we have to ask: why, precisely, is reasoned

* Akbar would have endorsed Thomas Scanlon’s diagnosis (in his illuminating studyof the role of reason in determining ‘what we owe to each other’) that we should not‘regard the idea of reason as mysterious, or one that needs, or can be given, aphilosophical explanation in terms of some other, more basic notion’ (What We Oweto Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 3).

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support so critical? Can it be claimed that reasoned scrutiny providessome kind of a guarantee of reaching the truth? This would be hardto maintain, not only because the nature of truth in moral and politicalbeliefs is such a difficult subject, but mainly because the most rigorousof searches, in ethics or in any other discipline, could still fail.

Indeed, sometimes a very dubious procedure could end up, accident-ally, yielding a more correct answer than extremely rigorous reason-ing. This is obvious enough in epistemology: even though a scientificprocedure may have a better probability of success among alternativeprocedures, even a crazy procedure could happen to produce thecorrect answer in a particular case (more correct, in such a case, thanmore reasoned procedures). For example, a person who relies on astopped watch to check the time will get the time exactly right twicea day, and if he happened to be looking for the time precisely at oneof those moments, his unmoving watch might beat all other movingclocks to which he had access. However, as a procedure to be chosen,relying on the motionless timepiece rather than on a clock that movesapproximately close to the actual time does not have much to com-mend it, despite the fact that the moving clock would be beaten twicea day by the stationary timepiece.*

It is plausible to think that a similar argument exists for choosingthe best reasoned procedure, even though there is no guarantee thatit would be invariably right, and not even any guarantee that it wouldbe always more right than some other, less reasoned, procedure (evenif we could judge the correctness of judgements with any degree ofconfidence). The case for reasoned scrutiny lies not in any sure-fireway of getting things exactly right (no such way may exist), but onbeing as objective as we reasonably can.† What lies behind the casefor relying on reasoning in making ethical judgements are, I would

* Leela Majumdar, the Bengali writer (and aunt of the great film director SatyajitRay), recollected in a children’s story, that when she was a feisty college student inCalcutta, she had stopped and asked a passing stranger – just to annoy and confusehim – ‘Oh, hello, when did you come from Chittagong?’ The man replied, in sheeramazement, ‘Yesterday, how did you know?’† See Bernard Williams’s powerful discussion about seeing reasoned belief as ‘aimingat’ truth (‘Deciding to believe’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1973 Facts, Values and Norms: Essays Toward aMorality of Consequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

)). See also Peter Railton,

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argue, also the demands of objectivity, and they call for a particulardiscipline of reasoning. The important role given to reasoning in thiswork relates to the need for objective reasoning in thinking aboutissues of justice and injustice.

Since objectivity is itself a rather difficult issue in moral and politicalphilosophy, the subject demands some discussion here. Does the pur-suit of ethical objectivity take the form of the search for some ethicalobjects? While a good deal of complex discussion on the objectivityof ethics has tended to proceed in terms of ontology (in particular, themetaphysics of ‘what ethical objects exist’), it is difficult to understandwhat these ethical objects might be like. Instead, I would go alongwith Hilary Putnam’s argument that this line of investigation is largelyunhelpful and misguided.* When we debate the demands of ethicalobjectivity, we are not crossing swords on the nature and content ofsome alleged ethical ‘objects’.

There are, of course, ethical statements that presume the existenceof some identifiable objects that can be observed (this would be a partof the exercise, for example, in looking for observable evidence todecide whether a person is courageous or compassionate), whereasthe subject matter of other ethical statements may not have thatassociation (for example, a judgement that a person is altogetherimmoral or unjust). But despite some overlap between description andevaluation, ethics cannot be simply a matter of truthful description ofspecific objects. Rather, as Putnam argues, ‘real ethical questions area species of practical question, and practical questions don’t onlyinvolve valuings, they involve a complex mixture of philosophicalbeliefs, religious beliefs, and factual beliefs as well’.17 The actual pro-cedures used in pursuit of objectivity may not be always clear, nor

* Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2004). Putnam is concerned not only with the unhelpfulness of the ontologicalapproach to the objectivity of ethics but also with the mistake it makes in looking forsomething that is far removed from the nature of the subject. ‘I see the attempt toprovide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of mathematics as, in effect,an attempt to provide reasons which are not part of mathematics for the truth ofmathematical statements and the attempt to provide an ontological explanation ofthe objectivity of ethics as a similar attempt to provide reasons which are not partof ethics for the truth of ethical statements, and I see both attempts as deeplymisguided’ (p. 3).

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spelt out, but as Putnam argues, this can be done with clarity if theunderlying issues are adequately scrutinized.*

The reasoning that is sought in analysing the requirements of justicewill incorporate some basic demands of impartiality, which are integ-ral parts of the idea of justice and injustice. At this point there is somemerit in summoning the ideas of John Rawls and his analysis of moraland political objectivity, which he presented in his defence of theobjectivity of ‘justice as fairness’ (a subject to which the next chapterwill be devoted).† Rawls argues: ‘The first essential is that a conceptionof objectivity must establish a public framework of thought sufficientfor the concept of judgement to apply and for conclusions to bereached on the basis of reasons and evidence after discussion and duereflection.’ He goes on to argue: ‘To say that a political convictionis objective is to say that there are reasons, specified by a reasonableand mutually recognizable political conception (satisfying thoseessentials), sufficient to convince all reasonable persons that it isreasonable.’18

There can be an interesting discussion as to whether this criterionof objectivity, which has some clearly normative elements (particularlyin the identification of ‘reasonable persons’), would tend to coincide

* In my book Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), I abstained fromany serious discussion of ethical methodology, and based the claim of acceptability ofsome general developmental priorities on rather commonsense grounds. HilaryPutnam has analysed, with clarity and definitiveness, the underlying methodology ofthat work in development economics, and has discussed how the particular method-ology of that work fits, happily for me, into his general approach to objectivity; seehis The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Vivian Walsh, ‘Sen after Putnam’, Reviewof Political Economy, 15 (2003).† I should emphasize here that there exist substantial differences between the way inwhich Putnam sees the problem of objectivity, which makes room for his scepticismabout ‘universal principles’ (Ethics without Ontology, ‘few real problems can besolved by treating them as mere instances of a universal generalization’, p. 4), andthe way Rawls gets at the problem, with his use of universal principles along withinvestigation of the specificities of particular ethical problems (Political Liberalism,pp. 110–18). Neither Rawls nor Putnam, however, is tempted to see objectivity ofethics in terms of ontology, or in terms of a search for some actual objects. In thiswork I draw on both Putnam’s and Rawls’s analyses, but do not explore further thespecific issues on which their differences rest.

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with what is likely to survive open and informed public discussion. Incontrast with Rawls, Jurgen Habermas has focused on the latter,largely procedural, route, rather than relying on some procedure-independent identification of what would convince people who are‘reasonable’ persons and who would find some political conviction tobe ‘reasonable’ as well.19 I see the force of Habermas’s point and thecorrectness of the categorical distinction he makes, even though I amnot fully persuaded that Rawls’s and Habermas’s approaches are,in fact, radically different in terms of the respective strategies ofreasoning.

In order to get the kind of political society that he tends to concen-trate on, Habermas also imposes many exacting demands on publicdeliberation. If people are capable of being reasonable in taking noteof other people’s points of view and in welcoming information, whichmust be among the essential demands of open-minded public dialogue,then the gap between the two approaches would tend to be notnecessarily momentous.*

I will not make a big distinction between those whom Rawls catego-rizes as ‘reasonable persons’ and other human beings, despite Rawls’sfrequent reference to – and the evident use of – the category of‘reasonable persons’. I have tried to argue elsewhere that, by andlarge, all of us are capable of being reasonable through being open-minded about welcoming information and through reflecting on argu-ments coming from different quarters, along with undertakinginteractive deliberations and debates on how the underlying issuesshould be seen.20 I do not see this presumption to be fundamentallydifferent from Rawls’s own idea of ‘free and equal persons’ who all

* Habermas also argues that the kind of agreement that would emerge in the systemhe describes will be substantively different from Rawls’s more ‘liberal’ rules andpriorities (‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’sPolitical Liberalism’, The Journal of Philosophy (1995)). What has to be determinedis whether those differences between Habermasian and Rawlsian conclusions in sub-stantive outcomes are really the result of the two distinct procedures used respectivelyby Habermas and Rawls, rather than resulting from their respective beliefs about howopen and interactive deliberations could be expected to proceed in free democraticexchanges. See also Jurgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks onDiscourse Ethics, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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have ‘moral powers’.* Rawls’s analysis seems, in fact, to focus moreon the characterization of deliberating human beings rather thanon the categorization of some ‘reasonable persons’ while excludingothers.† The role of unrestricted public reasoning is quite central todemocratic politics in general and to the pursuit of social justice inparticular.‡

adam smith and theimpartial spectator

Public reasoning is clearly an essential feature of objectivity in politicaland ethical beliefs. If Rawls presents one way of thinking about objec-tivity in the assessment of justice, Adam Smith’s invoking of theimpartial spectator provides another. This ‘ancient’ approach (as Iwrite these lines it is almost exactly 250 years since the first publicationof Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759) has a very longreach. It also has both procedural and substantive contents. In seekingresolution by public reasoning, there is clearly a strong case for notleaving out the perspectives and reasonings presented by anyonewhose assessments are relevant, either because their interests areinvolved, or because their ways of thinking about these issues throwlight on particular judgements – a light that might be missed in theabsence of giving those perspectives an opportunity to be aired.

While Rawls’s primary focus seems to be on variations of personal

* Rawls refers in particular to ‘two moral powers’, viz. ‘the capacity for a sense ofjustice’, and ‘a capacity for a conception of the good’ ( Justice as Fairness: ARestatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),pp. 18–19).† Indeed, we do not hear much from Rawls about how those who could be seen as‘unreasonable persons’ come to terms with ideas of justice, and how they would beintegrated into the social order.‡ See Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Alan Hamlin andPhilip Pettit (eds), The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford:Blackwell, 1989), and Politics, Power and Public Relations, Tanner Lectures at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, 2007. See also Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracyand Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1996).

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interests and personal priorities, Adam Smith was also concerned withthe need to broaden the discussion to avoid local parochialism ofvalues, which might have the effect of ignoring some pertinent argu-ments, unfamiliar in a particular culture. Since the invoking of publicdiscussion can take a counter-factual form (‘what would an impartialspectator from a distance say about that?’), one of Smith’s majormethodological concerns is the need to invoke a wide variety of view-points and outlooks based on diverse experiences from far and near,rather than remaining contented with encounters – actual or coun-terfactual – with others living in the same cultural and social milieu,and with the same kind of experiences, prejudices and convictionsabout what is reasonable and what is not, and even beliefs about whatis feasible and what is not. Adam Smith’s insistence that we must interalia view our sentiments from ‘a certain distance from us’ is motivatedby the object of scrutinizing not only the influence of vested interest,but also the impact of entrenched tradition and custom.*

Despite the differences between the distinct types of argumentspresented by Smith, Habermas and Rawls, there is an essential simi-larity in their respective approaches to objectivity to the extent thatobjectivity is linked, directly or indirectly, by each of them to theability to survive challenges from informed scrutiny coming fromdiverse quarters. In this work too, I will take reasoned scrutiny fromdifferent perspectives to be an essential part of the demands of objec-tivity for ethical and political convictions.

However, I must add here – indeed, assert here – that the principlesthat survive such scrutiny need not be a unique set (for reasons thatwere already presented in the Introduction). This is, in fact, a largerdeparture from John Rawls than from Hilary Putnam.† Indeed, anyapproach to justice, like Rawls’s, that proposes to follow up the choiceof principles of justice by the rigidity of a unique institutional structure

* See also Simon Blackburn’s discussion of the role of ‘the common point of view’,and in particular the contributions of Adam Smith and David Hume in developingthat perspective (Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1998), especially Chapter 7).† It is not a departure at all from Bernard Williams, see Ethics and the Limits ofPhilosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) Chapter 8. See also John Gray, Two Faces ofLiberalism (London: Polity Press, 2000).

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(this is part of transcendental institutionalism discussed in the Intro-duction), and which proceeds to tell us, step by step, an as if historyof the unfolding of justice, cannot easily accommodate the co-survivalof competing principles that do not speak in one voice. As discussedin the Introduction, I am arguing for the possibility that there mayremain contrary positions that simultaneously survive and which can-not be subjected to some radical surgery that reduces them all intoone tidy box of complete and well-fitted demands, which, in Rawls’stheory, take us to some unique institutional route to fulfil theserequirements (to be implemented by a sovereign state).

While there are differences between the distinct approaches toobjectivity considered here, the overarching similarity among themlies in the shared recognition of the need for reasoned encounter onan impartial basis (the approaches differ largely on the domain of therequired impartiality, as will be discussed further in Chapter 6).Reason can, of course, take distinct forms which have many differentuses.* But to the extent that we look for ethical objectivity, thereasoning that is necessary has to satisfy what can be seen as therequirements of impartiality. Reasons of justice may differ from, touse one of Smith’s expressions, reasons of ‘self-love’, and also fromreasons of prudence, but reasons of justice still constitute a largeexpanse. A lot of what follows in this work will be concerned withexploring that huge territory.

the reach of reason

Reasoning is a robust source of hope and confidence in a worlddarkened by murky deeds – past and present. It is not hard to see whythis is so. Even when we find something immediately upsetting, wecan question that response and ask whether it is an appropriate reac-tion and whether we should really be guided by it. Reasoning can beconcerned with the right way of viewing and treating other people,other cultures, other claims, and with examining different grounds

* I shall consider some of these differences in Chapters 8, ‘Rationality and OtherPeople’, and 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’.

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for respect and tolerance. We can also reason about our own mistakesand try to learn not to repeat them, in the way Kenzaburo Oe, the greatJapanese writer, hopes the Japanese nation will remain committed to‘the idea of democracy and the determination never to wage a waragain’, aided by an understanding of its own ‘history of territorialinvasion’.*

No less importantly, intellectual probing is needed to identify deedsthat are not intended to be injurious, but which have that effect; forexample, horrors like terrible famines can remain unchecked on themistaken presumption that they cannot be averted without increasingthe total availability of food, which can be hard to organize rapidlyenough. Hundreds of thousands, indeed, millions, can die fromcalamitous inaction resulting from unreasoned fatalism masqueradingas composure based on realism and common sense.† As it happens,famines are easy to prevent, partly because they affect only a smallproportion of the population (rarely more than 5 per cent and hardlyever more than 10 per cent), and redistribution of existing food canbe arranged through immediate means such as emergency employmentcreation, thereby giving the indigent an immediate income for pur-chasing food. Obviously, having more food would make things easier(it can help the public distribution of food and also more food avail-able in markets can help to keep prices lower than they would other-wise be), but having more food is not an absolute necessity forsuccessful famine relief (as is often taken for granted and seen as a

* Kenzaburo Oe, Japan, the Ambiguous, andMyself (Tokyo and New York: KodanshaInternational, 1995), pp. 118–19. See also Onuma Yasuaki, ‘Japanese War Guilt andPostwar Responsibilities of Japan’, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 20 (2002).Similarly, in post-war Germany, learning from past mistakes, particularly from theNazi period, has been an important issue in contemporary German priorities.† I have discussed the causes of famines and the policy requirement for famine preven-tion in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1981), and jointly with Jean Dreze, in Hunger and Public Action(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). This is one illustration of the general problem thata mistaken theory can have fatal consequences. On this, see my Development asFreedom (New York: Knopf and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and Sabina Alkire,‘Development: A Misconceived Theory Can Kill’, in Christopher W. Morris (ed.),Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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justification for inaction in arranging immediate relief). The rela-tively small redistribution of the food supply that is needed to avoidstarvation can be brought about through the creation of purchasingpower for those deprived of all incomes, through one calamity oranother, which is typically the primary cause of starvation.*

Consider another subject, which is beginning, at long last, to receivethe attention it deserves, that is, the neglect and deterioration of thenatural environment. It is, as is increasingly clear, a hugely seriousproblem and one that is closely linked with the negative effects ofhuman behaviour, but the problem does not arise from any desire ofpeople today to hurt those yet to be born, or even to be deliberatelycallous about the future generations’ interests. And yet, through lackof reasoned engagement and action, we do still fail to take adequatecare of the environment around us and the sustainability of therequirements of good life. To prevent catastrophes caused by humannegligence or callous obduracy, we need critical scrutiny, not justgoodwill towards others.21

Reasoning is our ally in this, not a threat that endangers us. So whydoes it look so different to those who find reliance on reasoning to bedeeply problematic? One of the issues to consider is the possibilitythat the critics of relying on reason are influenced by the fact thatsome people are easily over-convinced by their own reasoning, andignore counter-arguments and other grounds that may yield the oppo-site conclusion. This is perhaps what Glover is really worried about,and it can indeed be a legitimate worry. But the difficulty here surelycomes from precipitate and badly reasoned certitude, rather than from

* Further, since most famine victims suffer from and often die from standard diseases(helped by debilitation and the spread of infection caused by a growing famine), muchcan be done through healthcare and medical facilities. More than four-fifths of thedeath toll resulting from the Great Bengal famine of 1943 was directly connected withdiseases common to the region, with pure starvation death accounting for no morethan a fifth of the total (see Appendix D in my Poverty and Famines (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1981)). A similar picture emerges from many other famines. Seeparticularly Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1989); also his Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster ReliefIndustry in Africa (London: African Rights and the International African Institute,1997). This issue is assessed in my entry on ‘Human Disasters’ in The Oxford Text-book of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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making use of reason. The remedy for bad reasoning lies in betterreasoning, and it is indeed the job of reasoned scrutiny to move fromthe former to the latter. It is also possible that in some statements of‘Enlightenment authors’ the need for reassessment and caution wasnot sufficiently emphasized, but it would be hard to derive from thatany general indictment of the Enlightenment outlook, and even more,an arraignment of the general role of reason in just behaviour or goodsocial policy.

reason, sentiments andthe enlightenment

There is, however, the further issue of the relative importance ofinstinctive sentiments and cool calculation, on which several Enlight-enment authors themselves had much to say. Jonathan Glover’s argu-ments for the need for a ‘new human psychology’ draws on hisrecognition that politics and psychology are interwoven. It is hard tothink that reasoning, based on the available evidence about humanbehaviour, would not lead to the acceptance of this interconnection. Inavoiding atrocities, there is surely a huge preventive role that can beplayed by instinctive revulsion to cruelty and to insensitive behaviour,and Glover rightly emphasizes the importance, among other things, of‘the tendency to respond to people with certain kinds of respect’ and‘sympathy: caring about the miseries and the happiness of others’.

However, there need be no conflict here with reason, which canendorse precisely those priorities. Good reasoning has clearly playedthat role in Glover’s own investigation of the dangers of one-sidedand overconfident belief (Akbar’s point that even to dispute reasonone has to give a reason for that disputation is surely relevant here).Nor need reasoning withhold the understanding, if justified, that atotal reliance only on cool calculation may not be a good – or reason-able – way of ensuring human security.

Indeed, in celebrating reason, there is no particular ground fordenying the far-reaching role of instinctive psychology and spon-taneous responses.22 They can supplement each other, and in manycases an understanding of the broadening and liberating role of our

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feelings can constitute good subject matter for reasoning itself. AdamSmith, a central figure in the cottish Enlightenment (and very influentialin the French Enlightenment as well), discussed extensively the centralrole of emotions and psychological response in his The Theory ofMoral Sentiments.* Smith may not have gone as far as David Humein asserting that ‘reason and sentiment concur in almost all moraldeterminations and conclusions’,23 but both saw reasoning and feelingas deeply interrelated activities. Both Hume and Smith were, of course,quintessential ‘Enlightenment authors’, no less so than Diderot orKant.

However, the need for reasoned scrutiny of psychological attitudesdoes not disappear even after the power of emotions is recognizedand the positive role of many instinctive reactions (such as a sense ofrevulsion about cruelty) is celebrated. Smith in particular – perhapseven more than Hume – gave reason a huge role in assessing oursentiments and psychological concerns. In fact, Hume often seems totake passion to be more powerful than reason. As Thomas Nagel putsit in his strong defence of reason in his book The Last Word, ‘Humefamously believed that because a ‘‘passion’’ immune to rational assess-ment must underlie every motive, there can be no such thing as specifi-cally practical reason, nor specifically moral reason either.’† Smithdid not take that view, even though he, like Hume, took emotions tobe both important and influential, and argued that our ‘first percep-tions’ of right and wrong ‘cannot be the object of reason, but ofimmediate sense and feeling’. But Smith also argued that even theseinstinctive reactions to particular conduct cannot but rely – if onlyimplicitly – on our reasoned understanding of causal connectionsbetween conduct and consequences in ‘a vast variety of instances’.Furthermore, first perceptions may also change in response to critical

* See also Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).† Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 102.However, Hume seems to vary on the priority issue. While he does give passion anelevated standing that seems to be more dominant than the role of reason, Hume alsoargues: ‘The moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiencyof any means our passions yield to our reason without any opposition’ (David Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1888; 2nd edn 1978) p. 416).

S

reason and objectivity

51

examination, for example on the basis of causal empirical investi-gation that may show, Smith notes, that a certain ‘object is the meansof obtaining some other’.24

Adam Smith’s argument for recognizing the abiding need forreasoned scrutiny is well illustrated by his discussion about how toassess our attitudes to prevailing practices. This is obviously importantfor Smith’s powerful advocacy of reform, for example the case forabolishing slavery, or for lessening the burden of arbitrary bureau-cratic restrictions on the commerce between different countries, or forrelaxing the punitive restrictions imposed on the indigent as a con-dition for the economic support provided through the Poor Laws.*

While it is certainly true that ideology and dogmatic belief canemerge from sources other than religion and custom, and have fre-quently done so, that does not deny the role of reason in assessing therationale behind instinctive attitudes, any less than in the appraisal ofarguments presented to justify deliberate policies. What Akbar calledthe ‘path of reason’ does not exclude taking note of the value ofinstinctive reactions, nor ignore the informative role that our mentalreactions often play. And all this is quite consistent with not givingour unscrutinized instincts an unconditional final say.

* In his well-argued essay, ‘Why Economics Needs Ethical Theory’, John Broomeargues: ‘Economists do not like to impose their ethical opinions n people, but there isno question of that. Very few economists are in a position to impose their opinion onanyone . . . The solution is for them to get themselves good arguments, and work outthe theory. It is not to hide behind the preferences of other people, when thosepreferences may not be well founded, and hen the people themselves may be looking forhelp from economists in forming better preferences.’ (Arguments for a Better World:Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur, Vol.1(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 14). This is, of course, exactly what Smithtried to do.

o

w

451

Name Index

Abadian, Sousan xxiiAbbott, T. K. 418, 422, 428Abd al-Rahman III 334Abul Fazl’ 39, 420Ackerman, Bruce xxv, 324, 444Agarwal, Bina xxiv, 436Ahluwalia, Isher xxviAhluwalia, Montek xxviAhooja-Patel, Krishna xxviiAhtisaari, Marko 436Akbar, Indian emperor 36–9, 49, 51,

304, 334, 420Akerlof, George xxvi, 183, 419, 439Akhtar, Javed 36Alberuni (Iranian mathematician and

social commentator) 159, 431Alexander the Great 87–8Ali, M. Athar 420Alkire, Sabina xxiv, 47, 235, 246, 389,

436Allen, Ronald xxvAmbedkar, B. R. 330Anand, Paul xxvi, 95, 436Anand, Sudhir xxiii, xxiv, 435, 441Anderson, Elizabeth xxv, 263, 306,

439, 444Apollonius of Perga 174Appiah, Kwame Anthony xvii–xviii,

xxv, 143, 247, 373Aquinas, Thomas 184Arago, M. F. 446Ar is totle xxiv, 87–8, 91, 130, 184, 228,

231, 239, 253–4, 265, 322, 375, 404, 438, 448

Arneson, Richard A. 235, 437Aronson, Michael xxviiiArrian 88Arrow, Kenneth xvi, xxi, xxiii, 17, 52,

86, 92–4, 95, 107, 110, 198, 279–81, 314, 410, 418, 421, 422, 424, 425, 430, 435, 437, 439, 440, 447

Aryabhata (Indian mathematician) 158–9

Asali, Muhammad 436Ashoka, Indian emperor 69, 75–7, 80,

228, 331, 423Ashworth, Andrew 448Atkinson, Anthony B. xxiii, 257, 422,

437Attlee, Clement 324Audard, Catherine 73Augustine of Hippo 228Aung San Suu Kyi 290, 332

Bagchi, Amiya Kumar xxvi, 436Bagchi, Jasodhara xxviiBagehot, Walter 3, 324Bailyn, Bernard 356Banerjee, Abhijit xxviBanerjee, Dipak xxviBanerjee, Nirmala xxviBanik, Dan 390Bardhan, Pranab xxvi, 439Barnard, Catherine xxiv

452

name index

Barnes, Jonathan 311, 427Barro, Robert J. 446Barry, Brian 140, 380, 380–81, 430,

443Barry, Christian xxv, 449Basu, Alaka xxviiBasu, Dilip xxviiBasu, Kaushik xxii, 51, 182, 336, 349,

360, 377, 417, 427, 436, 437, 443Bauer, Peter xxviBeck, l. W. 216, 423Becker, Gary S. 189–90, 433Beitz, Charles R. xxv, 140, 376, 430Benabou, Roland 419Beneria, lourdes xxviBenhabib, Seyla xxvii, 44, 324, 325,

444Bentham, Jeremy xvi, 7, 9, 19, 62, 137,

231, 272, 275, 277, 283, 356, 357, 358, 361–3, 367, 395, 411, 446

Bentley, Edmund Clerihew 269Berlin, Isaiah xxv, 34, 72–3, 239, 282,

419, 438Bernholz, Peter 311, 427Bernstein, T. P. 445Besley, Timothy xxviBesson, Samantha 363Bhadelia, Afsan xxviiiBhargava, Alok xxviBhattacharya, Sourin xxiiiBilgrami, Akeel xxvbin laden, Osama 150Binmore, Ken xxviBirch, Phillip xxviiiBirdsall, Nancy xxviBlackburn, Simon xxiv, 45, 125Blackorby, Charles xxiii, 425Blau, Judith 358, 364Blau, Julian 427, 443Bliss, Christopher xxviBobbitt, Philip 374Bohman, James 326Bok, Hillary xxv, 221Bok, Sissela xxv

Borda, Jean-Charles de 91, 92, 280, 418, 424

Bose, Sugata xxviiBossert, Walter xxvi, 182Bourbaki, N. 105Bourguignon, François xxviBowles, Samuel xxvi, 422Bowring, J. 446Brahmagupta (Indian mathematician)

159Brennan, Geoffrey 432Breyer, Friedrich 443Breyer, Stephen xxv, 82Brighouse, Harry 436, 439Brison, Susan xxvBrittan, Samuel xxviBroad, C. D. xxiBroome, John xxv, 51, 198, 432Brundtland, Gro 248–50, 251–2, 438Bruno, Giordano 37, 334Buchanan, James 110, 291–2, 324, 441,

444Buddha, Gautama xiv–xv, 77, 87, 205–

6, 225, 251, 271, 331Burchardt, Tania xxiv, 235Burke, Edmund 1–2, 4, 31, 114–16,

122, 161, 300, 391, 417, 447Bush, George W. 343Buvinic, Myra xxvii

Cabatingam, lee xvCalabresi, Guido xxvCampbell, Donald E. 427Campbell, John 417Campbell, R. H. 256Carbonell, Ada Ferrer-i- 440, 441Carlyle, Thomas 269Carroll, lewis (C. l. Dodgson) 92, 424Carson, Clayborne 403Carter, Ian xxv, 436Cartwright, Nancy xxivCassen, Robert xxviChakravarty, Satya xxviChakravarty, Sukhamoy xxvi

name index

453

Chandragupta Maurya (Indian em-peror) 76

Chatterjee, Deen xxiv, 381, 430, 448–9Chatterjee, Somnath xiiChaudhuri, D. P. xxiiiChen, lincoln C. xxvii, 165, 436, 439Chen, Martha xxviiCheney, Dick 368, 369Chiappero-Martinetti, Enrica xxiv, 235,

243, 436, 437Chopra, Kanchan xxiii, xxvi, 436Clive, Robert 2Cohen, G. A. xxiii, 14, 61–2, 80, 163,

235, 292, 311, 325, 412, 422, 431, 437, 442

Cohen, Jonathan xxiiCohen, Joshua xxii, 44, 324, 326, 418,

443, 444Cohen, l. J. 427Comim, Flavio xxiv, 235, 436Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas

de Caritat, Marquis de xvi, 7, 9, 17, 21, 26, 86, 91–2, 92, 94, 107, 110, 111–12, 280, 325, 398, 410, 418, 424, 425–6, 429, 446

Copley, Stephen 430Cornell, Drucilla xxv, 242, 365Cowper, William 309Cranston, Maurice 382, 384, 418, 449Crawford, Vincent xxviCrocker, David A. xxiv, xxvii, 142, 235,

381, 437, 449Cronin, Ciaran 43, 392, 430

Daboni, l. 431d’Agliano, luca xxiiiDali, Salvador 16, 101Daniels, Norman xxv, 66Dasgupta, Asim xxvi

d’Aspremont, Claude xxvi, 425Datta-Chaudhuri, Mrinal xxviDavidson, Donald xxv, 278, 432Davis, John xxv, 183

De, Barun xxviiDeaton, Angus xxviDeb, Rajat xxiiDe-Shalit, Avner 257Deneulin, Séverine xxiv, 244, 438Denyer, Nick xxivDesai, Meghnad xxiv, xxviDescartes, René 174Dhongde, Shatakshee 182Diamond, Peter xxviDickens, Charles vii, 417Diderot, Denis 50Diogenes 88Dixit, Avinash xxviDobb, Maurice xxi, 442Dobson, Andrew 433Dodgson, C. l. 92, 424Donaldson, David xxvi, 425Doniger, Wendy 20Dr ze, Jean xxvi, 47, 165, 347, 349,

390, 439, 446, 449D’Souza, S. 439Duflo, Esther xxviDuguid, Richard xxviiiDumouchel, Paul 436, 437Dunn, John xxvii, 323, 329Durlauf, Stephen 422Dutta, Bhaskar xxviDworkin, Ronald xxiii, 8, 54, 264–8,

274, 291, 324, 351, 360, 411, 413, 440, 444, 447

Easterlin, Richard 272, 440Eatwell, John 358Edgar, Andrew 430Edgeworth, Francis 184, 272, 277,

432Eliot, T. S. 23, 210, 240, 418, 434,

438Elster, Jon xxv, 175, 278, 326, 419,

431, 438, 443Embree, A. T. 431Engelmann, Paul 31Epicurus 394

Dasgupta, Partha xxvi, 256

è

454

name index

Farrell, Michael J. 427, 443Fausboll, V. 434Fehr, E. 419Feiwel, G. 436Ferdinand I, Holy Roman emperor 21Ferejohn, John A. 427Fermat, Pierre de 174Fine, Ben xxiiFischbacher, U. 419Fisher, Franklin xxviFishburn, Peter C. 424Fiss, Owen xxvFitoussi, Jean-Paul xxviFleurbaey, Marc xxvi, 281, 425, 426,

428Flew, Anthony 112Folbre, Nancy xxviFøllesdal, Andreas 448Foster, James E. xxii, xxiii, 11, 198,

243, 246, 426, 436Frank, Robert xxviFrankfurt, Harry 294, 441, 442Freed, Fred 434Freeman, Samuel 55, 67, 132, 421, 423Frenk, Julio xxviiFreud, Sigmund 428Frey, Bruno S. 433Fried, Barbara xxvFriedman, Benjamin xxviFriedman, Milton 177, 432Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko xxiv, xxvii, 436Fukuyama, Francis xxvii

Gaertner, Wulf xxiii, 425, 427, 443Galbraith, John Kenneth 81–2, 423–4Gandhi, Mohandas 18, 210, 289–90,

353, 406, 446Gardenfors, Peter 443Gardner, Roy 443Garegnani, Pierangelo xxviGauthier, David 8, 83–4, 86, 411, 424Genovese, Catherine (Kitty) 374, 375,

382–3Geuss, Raymond 441–2

Gevers, louis xxvi, 425Gibbard, Allan xxv, 278, 427Gilbert, Margaret 246Ginsburg, Ruth Bader 406, 450Giovannitti, len 434Glendon, Mary Ann 359Glover, Jonathan xxv, 34–6, 36, 37, 48,

49, 221, 419–20, 436Gombrich, Richard 87Goodin, Frank 368Goodin, Robert E. 447, 448

Gorman, W. M. xxviGotoh, Reiko xxiv, 235, 436, 437Gottinger, Hans W. 427Graaff, Jan xxviGramsci, Antonio 34, 119, 120–22, 428Grandmont, Jean-Michel xxviGray, John 12, 45, 84, 131Green, Jerry xxviGreen, Peter 424Greiff, Pablo De 430Griffin, James xxvGriffin, Keith xxivGroves, Ted xxviGrunberg, I. 430Guest, Stephen xxiii, 384Guha, Ramachandra xxvii, 445Guillarme, Bertrand 73Gupta, Gita Rao xxviiGutmann, Amy xxv, 143, 325, 326

Habermas, Jürgen 43, 45, 134, 196, 324, 324–5, 392, 420, 444

Habib, Irfan 420Hacking, Ian xxivHaggard, Stephan 445Hahn, Frank xxvi, 439Hajime, Nakamura 445Halbertal, Moshe xxvHamilton, lawrence xxiiHamlin, Alan 44, 326Hammond, Peter J. xxiii, 425, 427, 443Handy, Christopher 246, 436

Gordon, David M. 433

name index

455

Haq, Mahbub ul xxiv, 226Haque, Wahidul xxviHardin, R. 443Hardy, Henry 419, 438Hare, Ivan 448Hare, Richard xxv, 292, 441Harris, Christopher xxviHarsanyi, John xxiii, xxvi, 198, 199,

292, 441Hart, Herbert xxv, 65, 363–4, 365,

377, 422, 447Hart, Keith 435Hasdai ibn Shaprut 334Hastings, Warren 1–2, 31Hausheer, Roger 438Hausman, Daniel xxvHawthorn, Geoffrey xxvii, 434, 435Hayek, Friedrich 77, 442Heaney, Seamus 26–7, 418Heckman, James xv, xxvi, 234Hepple, Bob 448Herman, Barbara 55, 137, 413, 417,

422Herz, Markus 124Hewart, lord 393–4Heyer, Judith xxviHicks, Douglas xxiiHicks, John xxviHirschman, Albert xxviHitler, Adolf 33, 34Hoare, Quintin 428Hobbes, Thomas xvi, 5–6, 8, 16, 25,

95, 96, 97, 138, 200, 203, 206, 308–9, 369, 379, 411, 412–13, 415, 418

Hobsbawm, Eric xxvii, 402Hochschild, Jennifer xxviiHoffmann, Stanley xxviiHolden, Barry 433Holland, Alisha xxviiHonderich, Ted xxv, 221Honig, Bonnie 444Honore, Tony xxvHorton, Richard xxvii

Hull, C. H. 435Humboldt, Wilhelm von 210Humphries, Jane xxviHume, David 45, 50, 136, 137, 146–7,

173, 395, 421, 430, 431Huntington, Samuel P. 141, 326, 444Huq, E. 439Hurley, Susan xxv, 430Hurwicz, leonid 425Hussein, Saddam 3Huxley, Aldous 321–2, 444, 445Hylland, A. 278, 443

Intriligator, Michael 17, 93, 198, 421, 440

Isherwood, Christopher 210Islam, Nurul xxviIslam, Rizwanul xxvi

Jackson, Frank 368, 447Jacquemin, J. C. 449Jahan, Selim xxivJain, Devaki xxviJain, Mahavira 87Jefferson, Thomas 356, 406Jeffrey, Robin 446Jalal, Ayesha xxviiJames, Susan xxvJesus of Nazareth 171–2, 200, 406Jevons, W. S. 277Johnson, Walter xxvii, 405Jolls, Christine xxii, 190–91Jolly, Richard xxivJorgenson, Dale xxviJourdain, M. 240Julius, A. l. 418

Kabir, Ananya xxivKahneman, Daniel xxvi, 176, 431, 440Kakwani, Nanak 437Kaldor, Mary xxvii, 349Kamm, Frances xxvKanbur, Ravi xxii, 51, 182, 360, 417,

435, 436

456

name index

Kanger, Stig xxvKant, Immanuel xvi, xvii, 6, 7, 8, 16,

50, 57, 69, 70, 95, 97, 117–18, 124, 129, 137, 196, 203, 216, 374, 377, 382, 411, 413, 418, 422, 423, 428, 447–8

Kaul, Inga 430Kautilya xiv, 69, 76, 77, 91, 184, 228,

423Kelly, Erin xxv, xxvii, 12, 44, 55, 67,

132, 212, 420, 421, 423, 433Kelly, Jerry xxiii, 424, 425, 427Kelsey, David xxiiKhan, Azizur Rahman xxviKhan, Qaiser xxviKhilnani, Sunil xxviiKhosla, Romi 227King, George 185King, Martin luther, Jr. vii, 18, 290,

332, 403Kipphardt, Heinar 212Kirman, Alan xxviKlasen, Stephan xxii, 448Kleinman, Arthur 285, 441Kliksberg, Bernardo 449Knaul, Felicia xxii, xxviiKolm, Serge xxviKornai, Janos xxviKorsgaard, Christine xvii, 417Kramer, Michael xxviKrueger, Alan 440Kruger, lorenz 443Kuklys, Wiebke 258, 439Kuper, Andrew 448Kymlicka, Will 100, 444Kynch, Jocelyn xxvi, 166, 436, 439

laden, Anthony xxii, 423, 429laffont, Jean-Jacques xxvilall, S. 433lane, Melissa xxviilaslett, Peter 418lawner, lynne 428lawrence, D. H. 310

lawrence, George 323layard, Richard xxvi, 273–5, 283, 440,

441leacock, Stephen 186, 433le Breton, Michel xxvileinfellner, Werner 427leon, D. A. 441letsas, George xxiiiletwin, William 294, 441levi, Isaac xxv, 103, 430, 431lewis, Anthony xxv, 327lewis, David levering 334lincoln, Abraham 116, 380lines, M. 431list, Christian xxv, 134, 426little, Ian xxvilocke, John xvi, 8, 70, 97, 411, 418lodovico 220lomasky, loran 432lopez-Calvo, luis-Felipe 437lovett, Frank xxviiiluke, St 171–2lukes, Steven 244lundestad, Geir 402luther, Anuradha xxvi

McEvilley, Thomas 88McFadden, Daniel 431Macfie, A. l. 69, 429, 431McGuinness, Brian F. 419, 428Machan, Tibor 33Mack, Elke 448Mackie, John 449Mcleod, Alistair xxvMcMurrin, S. 66, 231, 265, 283, 293,

432, 434Maffetone, Sebastiano xxvMaimonides 184, 333Majumdar, leela 40Majumdar, Mukul xxviMajumdar, Tapas xxiii, xxviMalthus, Thomas Robert 112Mandela, Nelson 18, 332–3, 406, 445Mani, Rama xxiii

name index

457

Mansbridge, Jane J. xxvii, 188, 290Manu (legal theorist) 20Mao Tse-tung 345, 445–6Margalit, Avishai xxvMarglin, Stephen xxviMarkan, Inga Huld xxviiiMarmot, Michael xxvii, 287–8Marshall, Alfred 272, 277Marx, Karl x, xvi, 7, 9, 14, 22, 163–4,

164, 245, 247, 356, 411, 431, 438, 442

Maskin, Eric xxii, 425Matilal, Bimal 169Matsumoto, Yasumi xxiiiMatthews, David 36Mazumdar, Dipak xxviMazur, Barry xxviiMeade, James xxvi, 291Meek, R. l. 69, 450Mehta, Pratap Bhanu xxviiMehta, Uday xxviiMeillet, Antoine 73Menocal, Maria Rosa 334, 445Michelman, Frank xxvMiles, Joanna xxivMilgate, Murray 358Miliband, Ralph xxvii, 345Mill, James 388, 390Mill, John Stuart xiii, xvi, 3, 7, 9, 200,

239, 269, 272, 275, 305, 311, 324, 411, 437, 442

Miller, David xxv, 11Milne, A. 384Minow, Martha xxvMirrlees, James xxiii, 198Mitchener, John 88Mokal, Riz xxiiiMolière 240Moncada, Alberto 358, 364Mongin, Philippe xxvi, 426, 428Monk, Ray 34Montesano, A. 431Mookerjee, Dilip xxviMookerji, Radhakumud 330

Moore, Charles A. 445Moosvi, Shireen 420Morgenbesser, Sidney xxvMorris, Christopher W. 47, 182, 389, 449Muellbauer, John xxvi, 435Mueller, Dennis 427Muhammad, the Prophet 37Mukherji, Anjan xxviMuller, F. Max 433Murad 38Murphy, liam 422Murphy, linda 60Murray, Christopher xxvii, 165Murray, William, 1st Earl of Mansfield

4–5, 417Murthi, Mamta xxviMussolini, Benito 120

Nagel, Thomas xxv, 25–6, 50, 54, 60, 71, 141, 157, 189, 291, 328, 413, 414, 418, 419, 422, 431

Naqvi, Khaleq xxvi Nash, John 281

Natsios, Andrew S. 445Nayyar, Deepak xxviNayyar, Rohini xxviNehru, Jawaharlal 210, 332Nelson, Eric xxivNelson, Robert xv, xxvNewman, Peter 358Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 37Njølstad, Olav 402Noland, Marcus 445Nozick, Robert xxii, 8, 16, 54, 84–5, 86,

96, 107, 274, 275, 291, 314–15, 326, 361, 411, 424, 426, 440, 441, 443

Nussbaum, Martha xi, xxiii–xxiv, 50, 66, 231, 232, 283, 421, 434, 436, 437–8

Nusseibeh, Sari xxv

Obama, Barack 64, 351Ockham, William of 184O’Conner, Condorcet A. 446

Nash, John 281

458

name index

Oe, Kenzaburo 47Ogata, Sadako 349

Okin, Susan Moller xxv, 117, 143O’Neill, Onora 382–3, 417, 449Oppenheimer, J. Robert 211–12O’Regan, Kate xxvOsmani, S. R. xxii, 377, 436Ostrom, Elinor xxvii, 203, 204, 433

Paine, Thomas 206–7, 361, 362, 364, 447

Palmer, J. 439Papandreou, Andreas xxiiPareto, Vilfredo 310–14, 337Parfit, Derek xxiii, 145, 419, 430Parker, Richard 423Parsons, Charles xxvPasinetti, luigi xxviPatel, I. G. xxviPatel, Mahesh xxviPatel, Surendra xxviPattanaik, Prasanta K. xxii, xxiii, 95,

182, 424, 436, 437, 443Patten, Chris 173, 402Pauer-Struder, Herlinde xxvPaul, St 172Peter, Fabienne xxv, 191, 441Pettit, Phillip xxv, 44, 217–18, 303–4,

304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 326, 369, 426–7, 442, 448

Petty, William 185, 226, 434–5Pfeiffer, H. 427Phelps, Edmund S. xxvi, 77, 421, 422Philips, Anne 236Picasso, Pablo 16, 101Pierik, Roland 266Pigou, A. C. 272, 277Piketty, Thomas xxviPlato 130, 404Podewski, K. 427Pogge, Thomas xxv, 54, 71, 140, 146,

263, 381, 423, 430, 439, 448Pol Pot 35, 36

Polanyi, Michael 414Pollak, Robert xxiii, xxviPollock, Sheldon 87Prabhavananda, Swami 434Proffitt, Stuart xxviiiPrzeworski, Adam 446Puppe, Clemens xxii, 95Putnam, Hilary xxii, 41–2, 45, 119,

156, 278, 357, 360, 420Putnam, Robert 438

Qizilbash, Mozaffar xxiv, 235, 436, 437

Quesnay, François 185Quine, W. V. O. xxii, 73

Rabin, Matthew 419Rahman, Anisur xxviRailton, Peter 40Raj, K. N. xxviRam, N. 349Ramos Pintos, Pedro xxviiiRamachandran, V. K. xxvi, 446Rangarajan, l. N. 184Ranis, Gustav xxivRaphael, D. D. 69, 429, 431, 450Ravallion, Martin xxvi, 435Rawls, John xi, xvi, xxi, xxii, 7, 8, 9,

10–12, 15, 16, 25, 26, 42, 43–6, 52–74, 77–81, 85, 89–91, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103–4, 105, 107, 108, 109–10, 122, 123, 124–5, 126–8, 129, 132–5, 136–8, 139, 140, 146–8, 150–51, 183, 195–6, 197–9, 200–201, 202, 203–5, 206, 231, 233–4, 254, 260–63, 264, 265, 291, 292, 297, 299–301, 304–5, 324–5, 328, 361, 377, 399, 410, 411–12, 413, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 425, 426, 428–9, 430, 433, 444

Ray, Debraj xxvi, 256Ray, Satyajit 40Raz, Joseph xxv, 54, 363, 376–9, 379,

448

Ó ’Gráda, Cormac 47, 85

name index

459

Reath, A. 417Reddy, Sanjay G. xxii, 430, 436, 448,

449Regan, Donald H. 434Rehg, William 326Reich, Rob 117Rhees, Rush 120Ricardo, David 388–90, 390Rich, Bruce 77, 423Richard the lionheart, King of En gland

333Richards, Carol xxviiRichards, David xxviiRichardson, Henry xxvRiley, Jonathan M. xxiii, xxvii, 427Riskin, Carl 445Robbins, lionel 277, 440Roberts, John G., Jr. 406Roberts, Kevin W. S. xxiii, 425Robertson, Dennis xxiRobertson, Jane xxviiiRobeyns, Ingrid xxiv, 90, 235, 266,

436, 437, 439Robinson, Mary xxviiRodrigues, Valerian 330Roemer, John xxiii, 57, 272, 440Rogers, Joel 444Roosevelt, Eleanor 359Rose-Ackerman, Susan xxvRoss, D. 438Ross, William David 448Roth, Alvin xxviRothschild, Emma xxii, 429, 432, 446Rothschild, M. E. 439Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xvi, 5, 6, 8, 16,

70, 97, 127, 200, 411, 418Rovane, Carol xxvRowntree, B. Seebohm 254–5Rudenstine, David xxvRuger, Jennifer Prah xxii, 235, 286–7,

437Runciman, Garry (W. G.) xxiv, 57,

256Russell, Bertrand 119

Rutherford, Sir T. 338Ryan, Alan xxv, 11

Sabel, Charles 418Sachs, Jeffrey xxviSaddhatissa, H. 434Sagoff, Mark 420, 433Saito, Madoka xxiiiSaladin (emperor) 333Salles, Maurice xxiii, 424–5, 428Samuels, Jane 227Samuelson, Paul 177, 435Sandbu, Martin xxiiiSandel, Michael x, xxiiSantos, Cristina 436Satz, Debra xxv, 117Scalia, Antonin 406–7Scanlon, Thomas xxii, xxvii, 15, 39,

54, 63, 127, 133, 138, 195, 197–8, 199–200, 200, 291, 293, 306, 360, 377, 418, 419, 433

Scarry, Elaine xxviiScheffler, Samuel 221Schelling, Thomas 177, 419, 431Schmeidler, David 425Schmid, Hans Bernhard 191Schmidtz, David 449Schram, Stuart 446Schramm, Michael 448Schwartz, N. 440

Scitovsky, Tibor 272–3, 440Sealet, Stephen 449Searle, John xxvSedley, Stephen xxvSegal, Paul 430, 448Seidl, Christian xxvi, 427, 443Selby-Bigge, l. A. 50, 421Sengupta, Arjun xxvi, 336Shakespeare, William 155, 196–7, 220,

278, 431Shiva Kumar, A. K. xxiiShklar, Judith xxv, 417Shorrocks, Anthony xxiii

Schwartz, Thomas 425

460

name index

Shotoku, Prince 331Shute, Stephen 430Sidgwick, Henry 118, 272, 428Silber, Jacques 437Silverthorne, M. 369Simon, Herbert 108, 176, 426, 431Singh, Nirvikar xxiiiSingh, Upindar 423Skinner, Andrew S. 256, 429, 432Skinner, Quentin xxv, 308–9, 369, 442Slovik, P. 176, 431Smart, J. J. C. 160, 438Smeeding, T. 439Smith, Adam viii, xi, xvi, 7, 9, 19, 21,

26, 44–5, 50–51, 69, 70, 86, 108, 123, 124–7, 130–32, 133–5, 136–8, 140, 141, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 162, 169, 177, 185–7, 188–9, 191, 197, 199, 200, 207, 256, 266, 275, 372, 394, 398, 404–5, 406–7, 411, 421, 429, 431, 432, 433, 442, 449, 450

Smith, Geoffrey Nowell 428Smith, Ron 436Smith, Vincent 420, 423Sobhan, Rehman xxvi, 436Solow, Barbara xxviSolow, Robert xxvi, 250, 251–2, 438Sonnenschein, Hugo 425Sparrow, John 171–2Spaventa, luigi xxii, xxviSpeirs, Ruth 212Spence, Michael xxviSraffa, Piero xxi, 33–4, 119, 120, 120–

1, 121, 428Srinivasan, T. N. xxviStafford, Eoghan xxiiiSta lin, Josef 35Starrett, David xxviStedman Jones, Gareth xxvii, 364Stein, P. G. 69, 450Steiner, Eva 448Steiner, Hillel xxv, 436Stephens, Ian 341

Stern, M. A. 430Stern, Nicholas xxvi, 420Stewart, Frances xxiv, 235, 244, 433,

438Stigler, George 186, 432Stiglitz, Joseph xxvi, 430, 439, 448Stigum, B. P. 431Strassman, Diana xxivStreeten, Paul xxiv, 235, 438Striker, Gisela xxivSubramanian, S. xxviSugden, Robert xxiii, 436, 437, 443Suiko, Empress of Japan 331Sun Yat-sen 332Sunstein, Cass R. xxv, 183, 190–91,

380, 397, 448Suppes, Patrick xxiii, 436Suskind, Ron 368Suzumura, Kotaro xxiii, xxvi, 95, 182,

362, 424, 425, 427, 430, 434, 437, 443

Swaminathan, Madhura xxviSwift, Adam 90

Tagore, Rabindranath 332Talbott, Bill xxviiiTalleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice

de 391, 393Tandja, Mamadou, head of Nigerian

government 343Tasioulas, John 363Taylor, Charles x, xxvTendler, Judith xxviThaler, Richard 183, 190–91, 431, 432Thapar, Romila 423

Thomson, Judith xxvThompson, Dennis xxv, 325, 326

Thurber, James xviii

Tirole, Jean xxvi, 419Tocqueville, Alexis de 323Tomaselli, Sylvana 115, 428, 447, 449Torrey, B. 439Townsend, Peter 256

Tinker, Irene xxvii, 431

name index

461

Trannoy, Alan xxviTuck, Richard xxii, 180, 369, 378–9,

418Tullock, Gordon 110, 441, 444Tungodden, Bertil xxiiTutu, Desmond 18Tversky, A. 176, 431

Valentis, laura xxiiiVan Gogh, Vincent 101Van Orman Quine, Willard 358Van Parijs, Philippe xxii, 65, 66Van Praag, M. S. 440–41Vaughan, Megan xxviiVenkatapuram, Sridhar 287Vickers, John xxviVickrey, William xxviVisaria, Sujata 436Vizard, Polly xxiv, 235

Waal, Alex de 48Waldron, Jeremy xxv, 171, 444, 447Walker, Kirsty xxviiiWalsh, Vivian 42, 119, 120, 358, 428Walt, G. 441Walzer, Michael xWedderburn, Dorothy xxvii, 439Weibull, Jorgen xxviWells, H. G. 76Wenstøp, F. 431Werhane, Patricia H. 432

Weyl, Glen xxviWeymark, John xxiii, 425, 428White, Barbara Harris xxviWieseltier, leon xxviiWilliam, Andrew 266Williams, Bernard xxii, 14, 40, 45, 160,

219, 239, 301, 422, 433, 435, 438, 441, 443

Williams, Glanville 448Wilson, Thomas 429, 432Wittgenstein, ludwig 31–4, 75, 119–

21, 172, 285, 419, 428Wolff, Jonathan xxiii, 257Wolfensohn, James xxviiWollstonecraft, Mary xvi, 7, 9, 21, 26,

115–17, 118, 122, 161, 206–7, 300, 361, 362–3, 365, 391–3, 396, 398, 428, 447, 449

Wordsworth, William 53Wright, Georg Henrik von 120, 172Wriglesworth, John l. xxiii, 427

Xu, Yongsheng 436

Yaari, Menahem xxviYasuaki, Onuma 47Yeats, W. B. 36

Zakaria, Fareed 409Zamagni, Stefano xxvi

462

Subject Index

accountability see responsibilitiesachievements and opportunity 235–43,

236, 287Afghanistan 149–50, 192, 402, 405Africa xi, 48, 116, 166, 257, 335, 343,

353, 384, 390, 409agencies 19, 23, 142, 184, 214, 215–9,

220–21, 231, 249–50, 254,286–90, 297–8, 375, 380–381,434, 437, 441, 442, 449

agency freedom 19, 249–50, 271,286–90, 297–8

agent relativity 161, 168, 169, 221Akbar, Indian emperor, on the priority

of reason 37–9, 49, 51Alberuni (Iranian mathematician) on

debates in ancient Indianastronomy 158–9

al-Qaeda 3America see United Statesanger, the role of 195, 390–92Arab history 247, 333–5Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and

Politics 91, 253, 375, 438, 448Arrow’s impossibility theorem (General

Possibility Theorem) 92–3, 110,279–81, 314, 410

Aryabhata (Indian mathematician) onprojections and astronomy 158–9

Ashoka, Indian emperor, on toleranceand dialogue 69, 75–7, 76, 228,331

atrocities 34, 35, 36, 49, 384Austria 33, 77

balloting see voting and electionsBastille, fall of vii, 1, 114behaviouractual ix, xi, 6–7, 10, 67–9, 79,

176–8, 204, 268, 354assumed 8, 32–33, 67–9, 178–83,

184–5, 188–90, 203–5weakness of will 176–8

Bentham, Jeremy, on natural and humanrights 356, 361–2, 363

see also utilitarianismBhagavadgita (Gita) 23–4, 208–17,

210, 212, 213bounded rationality 108, 176Brazil 335, 405, 409Brundtland Commission on sustainable

development 248–50, 251–2Buddha and Buddhism xiv, 77, 87,

205–6, 225, 251, 331Burke, Edmundon the American War of Independence

114, 115–16on the French Revolution 114–15his impeachment of Warren Hastings

1–2, 31on liberty 114–15, 116on plural grounding 1–2, 4Wollstonecraft on 115, 116, 122,

161

subject index

463

calendar, Muslim Hijri 37capability approach xi, 18–9, 65–6,

227, 231–47, 295–8achievement and 235–43, 236weighting of capabilities 242–3disability and 258–60, 306–7freedom and 228–30, 299–309, 305group capability 244, 246–7happiness and 270–71, 273–6limitations of capability focus 295–8non-commensurable elements in

239–41and obligation 205–7, 270–71poverty and 64–5, 237–8, 254–7resources and 253–8

capital punishment 405–6, 407caste xviii, 36, 60, 116, 145, 350, 351,

355children and parental duties 160,

161,169, 205–6, 214China 164, 166–7, 226, 246–7, 342,

344–6, 351, 405, 407, 409, 445choice, freedom of 18–19, 229–30,

245Christian ethics 170–72, 200, 247,

353, 406civility 365clash of civilizations, concept of 141class divisions 116, 142, 164, 246, 247,

355, 389Cohen, G. A., critique of John Rawls

regarding inequality 14, 61, 80,292, 325, 412

commitment and goals 188–90, 191–3,195

Commonwealth Commission on Respectand Understanding: Civil Paths toPeace 152

communication, the importance ofcross-cultural 87–9, 118, 121–2,151–2, 334, 336, 384–7

comparative assessments xi-xii, xvi, 9,15–18, 70, 96–105, 301–2

and reasoned incompleteness 102–5,107–8, 131–2

comprehensive outcomes 22–3, 215–17,220, 230, 239

Condorcet, Marquis Marie Jean de, andsocial choice theory xvi, 17, 91, 92,94, 107, 110, 112, 280, 410

Condorcet Paradox 92conglomerate theory 96–105, 106consequentialism 23–4, 210–21contractarian model see social contractcooperation 202–3, 204cultural distances, over-emphasis on x,

141, 143, 152, 162–3, 198, 321–2,328, 330–31, 332, 337, 404–7

cultural freedoms and rights 232,237–8, 366, 382

democracy ix, xiii, 44, 73, 112–3,321–337, 338–354

in America 81–2, 323, 351in ancient Greece 328, 329–30, 331as government by discussion ix, xiii,

3, 324, 326in ancient India 88–9, 321–3,

330–31in modern India 330–31, 348–51,

352–4in the Middle East 333–5media freedom and 335–7, 339, 341,

349as public reason 321–39security issues and 348–50voting and elections 93–4, 324,

326–7, 328deontological demands 18–9, 22–4,

141–2, 169–73, 205–7, 208–10,270–71

dialogue, public 39–44, 44–6, 87–9,118, 121–2, 151–2, 334, 380–87,409–10

dignity and humiliation vii, 116, 274,414–5

disabilitycapabilities and 258–60, 306–7poverty and 255, 258–61, 267–8Rawls on 260–61

464

subject index

disagreement, unresolved ix–x, 14–5,151–2, 396–9, 399–400

disengaged toleration, the need to gobeyond x

duty see deontological demandsDworkin, Ronaldcritique of the capability approach

264–8on democracy and rights 351, 360on resource equality 264–8, 274

East India Company 1, 2, 114economic crises, contemporary 151–2,

402–3economic and social rights 379–85education of women and men 94,

111–2, 227, 307–8Egypt 166, 329–30, 333–4elections see voting and electionsemotions and reason xvii, 36, 39, 50,

176Enlightenment, the xiii–xvi, 5–8, 34–6,

49–51, 91, 93, 124, 132, 134, 151,411

environmental issues 48, 66, 248–52,355

epistemology 40, 75, 121–2, 155–7,160, 169–70

equality ix, 64, 232–3, 274, 282–4,283, 291–9, 315–17

capabilities and 295–8impartiality and 293–5importance of 291–3, 297–8

ethical beliefsand human rights 358–61, 366–71,

375–6, 381, 386–7and objectivity viii, 41, 118, 156, 160and reason 39–46, 51, 121–2, 142

European Court of Human Rights(ECHR) 364

exclusionary neglect in social contracts138–9, 140–45

fairness see impartiality and fairness;‘justice as fairness’

famines 47–8, 85, 104, 166, 338–41342, 343, 344–5, 388, 389–90

famine prevention 342–5, 348–9, 390fear, freedom from 368–9feminism 115, 142, 151, 391France vii, 1, 91, 114–15, 274, 330,

355, 357, 361–2, 375, 380, 391freedom of speech 63–4, 326–7freedoms 18–19, 227–30, 281–2,

301–4, 305–9, 366–71French Revolution vii, 1, 91, 93, 114,

274Burke on 114–15‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’

114, 355, 357, 359, 361–2, 380

game theory 32, 216, 314–16gender inequality xi, 166–7, 169, 236,

242, 257, 350–51, 405General Possibility Theorem see Arrow’s

impossibility theoremGenovese, Catherine (Kitty), attack on

374–5, 382–3Germany 6–8, 33, 34, 47, 117–8, 129,

144, 372–6, 382–3, 386–7global development 42, 226–7, 248–52,

345–8, 381, 409global dialogue xiii, 380–87, 409–10global justice xiii, xv, 3, 24–7, 71–2,

127, 128–30, 140–45, 172–3, 328,373, 388–415

globalization 141–2, 143, 172–3,409–10

Greece 87–91, 130, 328, 329–30, 331group identity 128–30, 141, 142–3,

145–9, 244, 246–7, 255–6guilt, sense of 246

happiness ix, 13–14, 19, 49, 201,218–9, 226, 231, 269–90, 356,360, 379

Hart, Herbert, on human rights 363–4,365, 377

health and self-perception 164–6,284–6

subject index

465

healthcare xi–xii, 48, 104, 164–5,226–7, 238, 259, 285–6

Hobbes, Thomas, on liberty 308–9, 369Hong Kong 346human rights ix, 59–60, 64, 65,

115–17, 206–7, 296, 355–87human rights declarationsAmerican Declaration ofIndependence 174, 356, 357, 358,363, 380

French Declaration of the Rights ofMan 114, 355, 357, 359, 361–2,380

Universal Declaration of HumanRights by the United Nations 357,359, 366, 380–81, 386

human rights legislation 364–6, 386Hume, Davidon global neighbourhood 172–3on the original contract 147

identity 126, 141–3, 247, 334, 353,420, 428, 434, 443–4

impartiality and fairness 10–11, 12–15,42, 44–6, 54–5, 64, 117–18, 123,124–52, 162, 194–207, 404–5

impartial spectators see Smith, Adam,the ‘impartial spectator’

imperfect obligations, Kant’s analysis of129, 144, 372–6, 382–3, 386

impossibility theorems 92–3, 110–11,279–81, 309–14, 410

incentives 14, 60–61, 76, 80, 292, 325,342–3, 412

inclusionary incoherence of socialcontracts 139, 145–9

incompleteness of judgements, its roomin a complete evaluative theory102–5, 107–8, 131–2

see also partial orderingIndia and South Asia xii, xiii–xiv, 1–2,

20–22, 23–4, 37–9, 69, 75–7,87–8, 91, 114, 158–9, 160, 164–7,208–17, 242, 330, 338–41,350–51, 353–4

Indian constitution 37, 330Indian epic narratives 23–4, 87, 208–17inequality 60–62, 64, 80, 232–3,

282–4, 292see also equality

injustice, diagnosis of, as a starting pointvii–viii, 2, 173, 205, 242–3, 259,266–7, 271, 388–9, 413–4

injustice, sense of 2, 5, 388, 403institutions and their importance ix, xii,

6, 7, 8, 11–12, 25, 53, 56–7, 58,67–8, 77–86, 111–13, 262, 383,413

institutions, limitations of focusingexclusively on them xi, xiii, xvi, 68,75–81, 82–6, 267–8

intolerance and toleration 37, 47, 63,75–6, 111, 162, 275–6, 305,333–4, 353

Iran 166, 329, 330, 334, 405Iraq 2–4, 71, 129, 334Islam seeMuslimsItaly 34, 119–21, 257

Jainism 87, 88Japan 47, 331, 335, 349, 405, 445justicearrangement-focused analysis 7, 10,

20–21, 23–4, 82–6, 99–100,102–3, 209–10, 300–301

realization-focused analysis 6–10,18–24, 83–6, 213–14, 215–17,217–21, 315–16, 316–17, 338,354, 366–70, 372–6, 383–5

‘justice as fairness’ (Rawls’s notion of)xi, xvi, 8, 10, 11–12, 15, 26, 42–3,44, 52, 53–65, 67–8, 69–71, 72–4,77–8, 85, 108–9, 123, 124–5, 127,132–4, 139, 146–8, 150, 202,402–3, 411–12, 413

justice and its being seen to be done4–5, 392–4

see also global justice

Korea 327, 342, 346, 349, 405

466

subject index

labourand entitlements of efforts 13, 14, 60and claims of needs 14Marx on 14, 163

language 72–3, 118, 119–20, 121–2,182, 277–8

Latin America 335, 405, 409liberty ix, 59, 60, 63–5, 97, 104, 111,

274, 299–317, 369life expectancy 164–7, 226–7, 285, 296

Magna Carta 73, 331Mahabharata (Indian epic) 23–4, 87,

208–14maximization and minimization 174–6,

182media freedom 335–7, 339, 341, 349membership entitlement 8–9, 131–2,

134, 426methodological individualism 244–6Middle East 2–3, 71, 129, 166, 322,

329, 333–5, 378, 402, 405, 409minority rights 337, 352–4missing women 166–7Muslim history 2–3, 36–9, 49, 51, 71,

129, 166, 304, 322, 329, 333–5,378, 402, 405, 409, 420

Nash’s bargaining problem 280–82neighbours and neighbourhoods 170–73Niger 343Niti xv, 20–22, 67, 82, 86, 212–13.

225, 315, 326, 350, 354, 411,413

non-commensurability, fear of 239–41,395–6

non-governmental organizations(NGOs) 143, 151, 265, 409

North Korea 327, 342Nyaya xv, 20–22, 24, 68–9, 82, 86,

168–9, 213–14, 221, 225, 315,338, 350, 354, 411, 413

objective illusions and falseconsciousness 163–4, 284–6

objectivity viii, 31–51, 114–23,124–52, 155–73, 196, 386–94,408–10

obligations see responsibilitiesontology 41–2opportunity and achievement 228–30,

235–8L’Ordine Nuovo (Italian journal) 120outcomes, comprehensive 22–3,

215–17, 220, 230, 309overlapping consensus (Rawlsian

notion) 54ownership and property rights 60,

325–6

Paretian liberal, theorem on 309–14parochialism viii, xiv, 128–30, 139,

149–52, 402–7partial ordering 102–5, 107–8, 131–2,

135, 144, 243, 277, 298, 396,398–400, 426

plural reasons ix–x, 2, 12–15, 56–7,135, 200–201, 235, 239, 247,301–4, 305, 353–4

population growth 112, 139, 141positional perspectives and objectivity

155–7, 157–64, 165–7, 167–74poverty 64, 254–7, 258–61, 267–8power 19, 25, 35, 48, 81–2, 205–7,

249, 251, 270–71, 289, 294,301–5, 308, 323, 325, 340, 344,373, 386

prejudices xvii–xix, 35, 64, 143, 166–7,169, 236, 242, 350–51, 257, 351,405

press freedom see media freedomprimary goods 64–65, 66, 99, 233–4,

254, 260–63property rights see ownership and

property rightspublic choice theory 110, 291–2, 324,

439–40, 444public dialogue see dialoguepublic reasoning see reasoning and

public reason

subject index

467

Putnam, HilaryThe Collapse of the Fact/ValueDichotomy 41–2, 119–21, 357

Ethics Without Ontology 41, 42, 156

race-related inequality vii, 36, 60, 64,143, 246, 355

Ramayana (Indian epic) see ValmikiRamayana

rational choice theory (RCT) 32–3, 63,178–83, 188–90, 194, 400

rationality and reasonableness viii, 108,174–93, 194–207, 216, 369–70,369

Rawls, Johnand justice as fairness see ‘justice asfairness’

on the Difference Principle 60, 63,65–6, 78, 97, 139, 145, 234, 254,260, 261, 262, 297, 299

on disability 260–61on equality 291, 292on global justice 26, 328The Law of Peoples 11–12, 26, 55,

126, 128, 140on liberty 204–5, 299–301on moral powers 43–4on objectivity 42, 43, 122, 196original position, his concept of 9, 10,

15, 54, 55, 57, 61–2, 71, 104,109–10, 126–8, 132–4, 138–9,140, 145–8, 150–51, 197–9, 202

Political Liberalism 8, 42, 55, 59, 63,79, 109, 127, 134, 135, 138,150–51

on primary goods 233–4, 234, 254,260–63

on reflective equilibrium 53, 129on Adam Smith 136–8on the social contract 8, 57, 67,

69–71, 132–3, 136–8, 198–9,200–201, 203–5

A Theory of Justice xvi, 7, 8, 12,52–3, 55, 57, 58, 65, 109, 136,137, 198, 324–5, 325

reasoning and public reason viii, x,xii–xiii, xvii–xix, 4–8, 31–51, 33,39–46, 46–9, 50–51, 62–3, 68,79–80, 88–9, 110–11, 121–2, 127,130–31, 133, 138, 142, 167–9,175, 179–80, 182, 183, 194–207,210–19, 227, 231–3, 293, 314–7,321–415

‘reasonable persons’, Rawls’s use of thenotion 42, 43–4, 62–3, 68, 79–80,138, 194–207

reflective equilibrium x, 53, 129religious freedom 37, 303–4, 353–4republican (neo-Roman) theory of

freedom 304–9, 369resources, equality of 264–8, 274, 291responsibilities 19, 22–4, 160–61, 169,

205–6, 208–21, 238, 269–70,280–81, 372–6, 382–3

Rwanda 353

Scanlon, Thomas, his criterion ofprinciples that others cannotreasonably reject 15, 196–200, 293

self-interest 18–19, 32–3, 181, 182–3,184, 185–7, 188–9, 191, 194

Singapore 346slavery xi, 21–2, 77, 116, 121, 161,

398–9Smith, Adamthe ‘impartial spectator’ 44–6, 70,

108–9, 123, 124–6, 130–31,134–5, 136–8, 144, 149, 151, 199,404–5, 407

Kant on 124Lectures on Jurisprudence xi, 69Rawls on 136–8The Theory of Moral Sentiments viii,xi, 19, 44, 50, 69, 123, 124, 125,137, 187, 191, 372, 294

The Wealth of Nations 186, 256, 266social capital 255social choice theory xi–xii, xvi, 17–18,

22–3, 53, 91–6, 103, 106–11, 112,144, 279–82, 309–10, 314–17, 410

subject index

social contract, concept of xi–xii, 6, 8,57, 67, 69–71, 127, 132–3, 136–8,140–41, 198–9, 200–201, 203–5,205–7, 410–12

social realizations xi, 6, 7, 9–10, 15,18–22, 22–4, 70, 82–4, 86, 90, 94,134, 209–14, 215–16, 217–18,219–21, 261, 309–14, 315,316–17, 338, 354, 366–70, 372–6,383–5, 410, 411, 413

social welfare see welfare economicsSouth Africa xii, 116sovereign states and justice 25–6, 71,

128–30, 141–2, 145–6, 151–2, 247Soviet Union 82Spain 334sustainable development 227, 248–52see also environmental issues

sympathy 13, 36, 49, 114, 125, 185,188, 189, 190, 260, 308, 372, 388,414, 425

Taiwan 346terrorism 3, 71, 149–50, 151–2, 269,

369, 384, 402Thailand 335torture xii, 71, 96, 104, 144, 355, 358,

376transcendental institutionalism 4–10,

10–11, 12, 21–2, 24–7, 45–6,80–81

transcendental theory and perfect justicevii, ix, xi, xii, 6, 9, 10–12, 15–18,95–105, 106, 135

United Nations (UN) 3, 151, 226, 257,409

see also Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights

United States (US) 2–4, 3, 7, 21, 64, 81,114, 115–16, 121, 129, 161, 174,

226, 351, 356, 357, 358, 369, 380,402

the US Supreme Court and debatesamong the judges xi, 404–7

Universal Declaration of Human Rights,1948 (UN) 357, 359, 366, 380–81,386

utilitarianism 6, 13–14, 15, 19, 62, 70,86, 96, 137, 160, 184, 200, 218–19,231, 239–40, 272–3, 277–8, 281,292, 360, 362, 378, 384, 388

Valmiki Ramayana (Indian epic) 87voting and elections 93–4, 324, 326–7,

328see also democracy

welfare economics 272–3, 277–8, 281–2welfare rights see economic and social

rightswell-being and freedom 270, 282–90,

362Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31–2, 33–4, 75,

119–20on pain 285Philosophical Investigations 33, 120,

120Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 31,

33, 119, 120Wollstonecraft, MaryA Vindication of the Rights of Men

115, 116, 122, 161, 362–3AVindication of the Rights ofWoman

115–16, 116–17, 363, 391–3women and justice xi, 71–2, 162–3,

166–7, 245, 296, 374–5see also feminism; gender inequality;missing women

women’s education 94, 111–12women’s rights 115, 116–17, 142,

162–3, 237, 363, 365, 391–3